Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) | Richard Russo

Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) | Richard Russo | Rich and velvety

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Bridge of Sighs: A...

	Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Richard Russo Vintage, 2008 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 127 reviews view larger image
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Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family, and his own life that makes up this rich and mesmerizing novel, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and has never looked back.

Bridge of Sighs, from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, is a moving novel about small-town America that expands Russo's widely heralded achievement in ways both familiar and astonishing.

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Great selection for a book discussion group

This is another Russo novel featuring well-rounded characters is realistic situations. There is hope, despair, humor and fine observations of everyday life throughout the wonderful novel. A great read and a good choice for a book discussion group.

Rich and velvety

You can complain all you want but this was a strikingly rich and smooth dessert of a read. I loved it until the end which I felt was just a bit forced: almost as if Mr. Russo plunged into the hat of improbable endings and out popped "adopts an underprivileged teenage girl." Oh well, it didn't really matter; the journey was wonderful. Russo's description of small-town upstate New York life is absolutely masterful - and his characters also totally pitch perfect. Another one, please!

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Long but interesting

It is long but good reading. In places it brings to one's mind Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks". But it lacks Mann's tightness of narration.The tone is also not uniform. It has searing passages followed by blase description.Some episodes seem unnecessarily incorporated. But the characterization of the protoganists, Lou, Tessa, Lou-lou, Sarah and Bobby is admirable. It brings them before your eyes as living people. Sarah falling in love with two persons at the same time but choosing certainty of consistent love over possible passion should be a lesson to all boys and girls. It was a pleasure reading it.

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With a wry smile

The main narrative is an autobiography of Louis C Lynch, who is known as Lucy and is such a nice guy that he is suspected of being gay. This is interspersed with story from the view point of his wife Sarah and his old friend Noonan, who has escaped Thomaston, their benighted small town in upstate New York, to become a big time artist. Lou's autobiography goes back for most of the time to their teenage years in Thomaston, a place blighted by oncogenic decaying industries and racist, homophobic bullies.
It is strongly plotted and an absorbing read but I was a little disappointed. Because of the setting and the literary plaudits, including a Pulitzer Prize, that put him in the category of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Joyce Carol Oates, I had been expecting dirty realism and minimalism, but I found Russo to be long-winded. He uses lengthy stretches of interior monolog instead of dialog and does a lot of telling instead of showing. Clichés abound. Characters speak, on more than one occasion, "with a wry smile." The black characters, and only the black characters, have their dialect rendered phonetically, with speech such as "Lease you ain't loss your mind completely"

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A Long Train of a Story

Having enjoyed Russo's novel, Empire Falls, I decided to read deeper into his list by picking up The Bridge of Sighs. The book is one long train running. Like a train, it takes a while to get up to speed. Also like a train, it has many compartments. It starts with a first-person narrative as one of the main characters (a man who has had the nickname "Lucy" since first grade) writes a memoir mixed with a town history. The story than skips to his boyhood friend ("Noonan"), who left town at the end of high school and has never returned. This sets up the central framework of the book.

Through the course of the narrative, the reader meets most everyone in the small town of Thomastown, New York. Lucy and his relationships reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly of life in a one-company town. His naive father, his prescient mother, his rascally uncle, are the early people in his life. However, as he grows up he exists in a decaying place. Ultimately, he and Noonan part a couple of times, the second time for good when Noonan has to escape the law.

Like Empire Falls, this Russo book pries into the deepest recesses of people's lives. He changes perspective in order to reveal different points of view of the same incident. This is where the story can be very powerful. However, at times the repetition grows tedious. Either way, Russo will take you on a long ride that can be insightful and enjoyable.

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