The wisdom of the little town

Published on January 27, 2008

Bridge of Sighs
By Richard Russo
Published by Alfred A Knopf, 2007
Available at the Nielsen Hays Library   
Reviewed by James Eckardt
The Nation

Just as William Faulkner carved out a fictional universe in Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County, 58-year-old Richard Russo has fashioned his own literary world from the depressed little towns of upstate New York.

In "Nobody's Fool" and "The Risk Pool" his characters are crafty, cantankerous, profane and, very often, drunk. Everyone in these little towns has known each other from childhood and, if they don't escape, they watch each other grow old and die.

Seven years ago "Empire Falls" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and, like "Nobody's Fool", was made into a feature film.

Now Russo is back with a magnum opus, "Bridge of Sighs". This time it's Thomaston that is the small town in decline. Its tannery, a carcinogenic sumphole that routinely stained the local river red, has been closed.

In a twist, though, the hero is a cheerful, teetotal optimist named Lou Lynch whose life has mimicked that of his equally upbeat father and produced a near-clone of a son. He tells his story in plain speech, beginning with these words:

"First, the facts.

"My name is Louis Charles Lynch. I am sixty years old, and for nearly forty of those years I've been a devoted if not terribly exciting husband to the same lovely woman, as well as doting father to Owen, our son, who is now himself a grown, married man."

We follow him from his baby-boomer childhood in the 1950s to the present day. His father Big Lou rose from a milkman in the slum of the West End to a grocery-store owner in the middle-class East End.

His son Owen jokes about the "Lynch Empire", which now encompasses three convenience shops, a video-rental store, an ice-cream parlour and a couple of apartment buildings. The family lives in the wealthy Borough section of town. 

A civic booster nicknamed "Mr Mayor", Lou Lynch has set himself the task of writing his hometown's history, but it turns into the story of his own life. An only child, lonely, bookish and shy, his sole childhood friend was a neighbour named Bobby Marconi, who protected him at school.

The son of an abusive father and cowering mother, Marconi escapes Thomaston, reverts to his mother's maiden name of Noonan and establishes himself as a rich and famous painter, wandering from London to Paris to Barcelona to Rome.

The narrative point of view now shifts to Noonan, established in Venice, who has never returned to his hometown and, in fact, hasn't been back to America in 20 years. After a series of marriages, he's now conducting an affair with a married gallery owner. The banter in this section is sophisticated and cutting.

Lou Lynch has faithfully written to him over all these years, enclosing newspaper clippings, and is now planning a trip to Italy. Or rather, his wife is planning the trip: Rome, Florence, Venice.

As departure day nears, the couple fret that they haven't heard from Bobby. In high school the trio had been the best of friends. This is the narrative tension that hurtles the plot forward.

Their friendship had been cemented when Bobby returned from a long absence at a military boarding school, where he'd been banished by his father after a legendary fistfight with the town bully. In a beautifully written set piece, we see the Lynch family swapping highly comical dialogue at their grocery store: the genial Lou, his sharp-tongued wife Tessa and his rakish brother Dec.

Lou Junior has gained a great deal of confidence now that he has a girlfriend.

Sarah is a highly talented artist who has adopted the family. Joining the family, Bobby, despite himself, is hugely attracted to Sarah.

Though set in the present, the novel constantly spirals back into the past, especially the high-school years of the three main characters, Lou, Sarah and Bobby. Midway through the novel, Lou reflects:

"What, I wondered, if we all were just who we were? What if we were kidding ourselves if we believed otherwise? Was that what my mother had wanted to convey when she said I needed to get smarter about people if I was going to survive in the world? Did she want me to understand that we have little choice but to slog forward through life, repeating our worst mistakes without ever learning from them, or worse yet, without being able to use what we'd learned?"

Two-thirds through the book, 17-year-old Sarah takes over the story. The plot now takes a hugely unexpected shift - jumps the rails, really - and gallops to a violent conclusion that segues into a long, gentle coda that ends with an unexpected addition to the Lynch family, a 12-year-old black girl named Kayla.

The main characters are all 60 now, but their fates were sealed in high school. You could call this The Great American High School Novel.