BRIDGE OF SIGHS

author:
RICHARD RUSSO

Fiction
642 pages
Vintage Books

Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs is his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls in 2001. Russo is becoming a bit of the John Steinbeck of upstate New York and Maine, filling his novels and stories with richly drawn characters and locales of the region while taking on some sweeping themes in the process.

Bridge of Sighs, at 642 pages, is ambitious but its characters are humble. The story tackles nothing less than the question of faith/gullibility over skepticism/knowledge. It centers on the practically prelapsarian Louis Charles (Lucy) Lynch, who is either a big simpleton or a good man trying to see the best (and not see the bad or the true) in others. His foil is the dangerous, sexy Bobby Marconi who gets the hell out of town to become an internationally renowned artist living in Venice (home of the Bridge of Sighs) though is haunted his past.

What I like:

The book is long but it is never dull. Lots of plot. Great stories. Beginning with the story of schoolyard bullies tormenting the young protagonist; a visceral, chilling retelling that will have you on the edge of your seat. The intermittent and inevitable tales of violence that give the novel structure are more than leavened with quieter and funnier passages.

There is the story of the English teacher who is writing a fifteen hundred-page novel, a withering attack on the small-mindedness of small town America that “will detonate the real place that had inspired it.” Alas, the book is rejected by all publishers (but it does help to let the air out a bit on Russo’s own Important Work where said teacher is leading a class called nothing less than “American Dream”).

There is the story of the two Spinnarkle “sisters” whom Lucy’s dad saves from a fire, finding them naked in bed together in the process. There is also a great scene of a regretful deb who has just surrendered her virginity to Bobby and wishes desperately to rewind history. And there are wonderfully drawn characters, in particular Lucy’s mother, Tessa Lupino Lynch, who snappishly puts up with her good-hearted husband Big Lou and is constantly rubbing her temples at his impossible lunkheadedness.

Russo’s novel is filled with sly, wry and witty observations. Not always or often laugh-out-loud funny, but bittersweet and somehow more satisfying. Also, I like that Russo writes his characters from the “inside out” and not like an anthropologist studying chimp behavior. These characters are human beings, not caricatures.

What I’m unsure about:

I’m not sure I agree with the heroism of the central character. In the end, it feels like Russo is absolving Lucy of his sins because he has finally opened his eyes and acknowledged that he “knows what he knows” and has started to look at the world in a more informed, truthful manner. It seems that Lucy’s getting off a bit easy. The spells that the character suffers throughout the novel strike me as passive-aggressive behavior that has kept his wife Sarah by his side throughout the years. And, maybe it’s just the woman in me, but I wish to hell that the reportedly intelligent, charming and talented Sarah didn’t have to settle for an entire life of so little roaring thunder between the legs, and I don’t just mean from the few brief rides on Bobby Marconi’s borrowed Indian motorcycle.

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