Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Bridge of Sighs Reviews

• 
  Jim Fonseca

  The book is structured a lot like Empire Falls. Its major theme is movers vs. stayers which I talked about in my review of Empire Falls so I copied that at the bottom of this review.
  
  The main character is the “stayer” who is happy as a clam running a convenience store across the street from where he has lived almost all his life. He is married to a local woman – high school sweetheart. His mother had wanted him to finish college out of town, marry a girl from AWAY and get a real job outside this dying upstate New York tannery town. He didn’t do any of these things. We get right into it on the first page:
  
  “…I’ve lived all of it [my life] in the same small town in upstate New York…Some people, upon learning how we’ve lived our lives, are unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so limited, as if experience so geographically circumscribed could be neither rich nor satisfying. When I assure them that it has been both, their smiles suggest we’ve been blessed with self-deception by way of compensation for all we’ve missed.” Of his father, his mother says: “How sure he is that it’s better right here than in all the other places he’s never been to.”
  
  
  
  The “leaver” was his childhood buddy, who became an artist in Venice --- a true leaver; he never came back and never looked back. His only contact with back home are letters from the main character that usually begin along the lines of “guess who died” with an obituary enclosed. Both men are now of retirement age.
  
  That leads us to a second main theme: I’ll call it the inequality of friendships. Yes, they hung out together at times but the main character almost “pestered” the artist with his friendship. That’s still going on fifty years later. In fact, as the book opens, the main character and his wife are planning to visit him in Italy. His wife had had a relationship with the artist in high school, so it will be an interesting visit.
  
  A third major theme is the “home away from home” provided by the convenience store for all these kids when they were young. The main character loved working and hanging out there; others, including his eventual wife, sought refuge there from troubled home lives. This setting is like the lunch counter/restaurant featured in Empire Falls.
  
  Like Empire Falls, class and geography and the intersection of the two are another theme, throwing in race and ethnicity, and including some ugly racial incidents. There are three sectors of town – lower class, middle and a small sector for the elite. Geographers (I’m one) believe that space and social class overlap and when someone says “know your place,” they mean just that. There’s a section where the main character talks with a boy who will be moving out of the lower-class neighborhood to the middle class one and who believes his life will change. He will start wearing plaid dress shirts instead of T-shirts; the teachers will think better of him, so he will do better at school and he’ll start taking advanced classes. And there’s some truth to that: a good way to pull a lower socioeconomic class family out of a cycle of generation of poverty is to plunk them down in a middle-class neighborhood where they will absorb the values of those around them.
  
  We should make Russo an honorary geographer. The only thing I’ll ding him on is minor: he makes the east side of town the ritzy section, whereas in the US, more often than not, the east side of town houses the lower-class sector because prevailing westerly winds blew factory pollution eastward: east St. Louis, east Chicago, east Hartford, etc.
  
  There’s humor and good writing: “Sarah [his wife] believes people take advantage of my good nature, my willingness to listen carefully to everyone, even after it’s become clear they have nothing to say.”
  
  “What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.”
  
  “Truth be told, he didn’t have much use for Italians and Catholics either, though to his shame he was both.”
  
  This is about how fixated the main character was on the past. “At seventeen, he was already as backward looking as an octogenarian. He’d begin every other sentence with the same word, ‘remember.’”
  
  “Stupidity, ignorance and violence, the Thomastown Trifecta.”
  
  
  
  And it’s a love story of the ups and down in the marriage of the main character and his wife, as well as of his mother and father as observed by the boy as he grew up.
  
  This is a great story and a good book; my fourth of Russo’s. But I gave it a “4” because it’s a bit bloated and could use some cutting – my paperback goes on for 640 pages! Couldn’t we have had three conversations instead of five where he philosophizes with the old black man painting the fence? Or one scene when the sexiest chick in high school comes into the store and sweet talks him into giving her a free pack of cigarettes instead of three scenes? Or four or five scenes of his dizzy spells (from a childhood trauma) instead of what seems like a dozen?
  
  Still a great read.
  
  Here’s the stuff about movers and stayers from my Empire Falls review:
  
  To me, a major theme of this book is what it would be like to have stayed in your hometown. As a geographer I enjoy reading and thinking about this theme. There are Movers and Stayers and even research studies about how these folks are different – we all know both types. A recent Pew Research study (
  http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-cont...) found that “movers” tend to be college educated; they move for jobs and once they move out of their hometown they are likely to move again in search of better employment and greener pastures. The “stayers,” about 37% of American adults who still live in or around the town they were born in, stay for family ties. The Mid West has the highest proportion of stayers; the West the least; East and South are in the middle.
  
  top photo from hiveminer.com
  bottom photo from newyorkupstate.com
  
• 
  Will Byrnes

  The Bridge of Sighs is that Venice pont which prisoners traverse on their way to jail, usually for good. The sighs are the prisoners bemoaning their dark fate. Are we all so condemned? Set in the upper reaches of New York, the small city of Thomaston is familiar territory for readers of Empire Falls. This is more than a family tale. It is the story of a town as epitomized by a group of friends and relations over three generations. The big theme here is predestination, whether people are fated to certain ends regardless of their desires. Characters face the momentum of their past and either submit or rebel. Even in rebellion they remain who they are. The river runs red with the effluent of the town’s largest employer, a tanner. While the tanner employs many in the area, it also poisons the ground water and kills via cancer the same people it supports with jobs. Perhaps that is the Edenic apple. There are multiple narrators here, primary of which is Louis Charles Lynch, cursed with the nickname Lucy when a teacher reads the roll, shortening Louis and adding his initial. We follow his life from childhood to age 60 when he and his wife prepare to travel to Venice to see a long-lost friend. Renowned painter Robert Noonan was a major force in their lives, friend to Lucy, more than friend, maybe, to Lucy’s wife Sarah.
  
  
  Richard Russo - image from The Guardian
  
  There are class boundaries, some of them hard-wired into streets that divide better off neighborhoods from the less fortunate. Characters cross those neighborhood and class borders, but the marks left by those lines remain, like faded scars. Racism rears its nasty face, as was not exactly unknown in the 1950s. We get to see some growth there as well.
  
  This is such a tale of parallel structures that it seemed lattice-like. First we have pairs of fathers and sons; Big Lou, a large, naively optimistic, friendly milkman and his son, Lucy, the primary narrator, who is more like him than not. Bobby Marconi is a tough kid, best friends with Lucy, his protector for a time. His father is a harsh, angry man, friend to no one, cruel to his family, verbally abusive, unfaithful. Bobby carries his father’s violent tendencies within, occasionally letting loose. George Mock and his son, Three, offer a lesser echo of the father-son patterns. Three and Bobby reject their fathers as much as Lucy embraces his. Mother-daughter dynamics are not ignored. Sarah Berg and her mother are in focus towards the end of the book, as is Sarah’s relationship with Tessa.
  
  Each generation has its seducers, those who have it in their nature to attract women with the pheromone of reckless excitement. Declan was that for Tessa as Bobby is/was that for Sarah. Jerzy’s girlfriend, (I forgot her name), serves the opposite purpose for Lucy, as she offers a Lolita-ish tease in return for the right to get free stuff from Lucy’s family store, and to ignore him when he cannot offer her material rewards. Nan, the prettiest girl in town, daughter of the richest man, is an empty, vacuous vessel, concerned solely with appearances, as her mother is later shown to be.
  
  What happens to the hopes of youth? For Tessa and Sarah it was their art. Yet it is the rough and tumble Bobby who winds up becoming an artist. Maybe he could only do that by escaping from Thomaston. The thuggish Jerzy is perhaps the most transformed of all. Guilty of bullying to the point of traumatizing Lucy and to putting an innocent into a coma, he is transformed when, laden with guilt for his major crime, he becomes receptive to the intellectual gifts offered by Sarah’s teacher father and ultimately finds an outlet in academia, again away from Thomaston. Yet one need not leave town to find success. Big Lou, then Lucy are perfectly content to remain where they are, building the small business that becomes the centerpiece of their very fulfilling lives. Yet is Lucy ever condemned by his spells to a life of at least occasional withdrawal? Isn’t he, at least in part, hiding out in the face of stress, just as he did in the trunk?
  
  Was Sarah’s father’s fate predetermined? He is a drug addict and an intellectual. We learn that it was his addiction that caused him to leave the big city and hide out in Thomaston, and later he turns to his addiction when life becomes too hard. Bobby’s mother also turns to drugs to dull the pain of her existence.
  
  Russo’s characters breathe with life. I found that I identified with one in particular and suffered pangs when it appeared that he would be betrayed by people close to him. I related to the very human flaws in the characters, Lucy’s narrow optimism, Mister Berg’s rage at the ignorance around him, Bobby’s disgust with his father, Sarah’s attraction to both the excitement of Bobby and the warmth and solidity of Lucy.
  
  I felt at times that I was in that uncomfortable position of being able to access the secret thoughts and writings of those who are close, and finding out what they really think and feel. It is never as laudatory as one might hope. It was a creepy, voyeuristic experience. That Russo made me care that much about the characters offers proof of the effectiveness of his story-telling.
  
  Do I share Lucy’s passivity? How about the passion of Bobby, the artistic leanings of Tess, Sarah and Bobby, the intellectual excitement that was stirred in Jerzy, both Mister Berg’s rage against the night and his disinterest in certain passions of the flesh, the feelings of powerlessness to defend against the Bobbies of the world that Lucy and Big Lou must have felt, the need to get away that Bobby felt. While I may have grown up in the Bronx, it always felt to me like a Podunk town. Yet, maybe it is my destiny never to really escape from that place, regardless of where I live. Some do, some don’t. Life sets us up pointed in a certain direction, and we can overcome that, but it takes a concerted effort and some good fortune.
  
  I liked the book a lot, although it felt a bit less satisfying than did Empire Falls. Still, this one is heartily recommended.
  
  =============================EXTRA STUFF
  
  Links to the author’s
  GR and
  FB pages
  
  My reviews of other Russo novels
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  Chances Are
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  That Old Cape Magic
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  Empire Falls
• 
  Sarahfina

  First the bad news: Russo, as one of the Great Male Narcissists (a term coined by D.F. Wallace who did not include Russo in his assessment)has probably been accused of both racism and misogyny and these allegations do have some merit.
  
  I have read all of Richard Russo's books and I have greatly enjoyed them all. But I am troubled by the fact that often, if a female character isn't chasing you with a rolling pin, she's got your dick in her mouth. Crazed harridans and insatiable sluts make up the majority of Russo's novels' female population. Unless a character is the wise wife-y stand-in in which case she's completing your thoughts, balancing your checkbook, ironing your shirts and reminding you to get that lump checked out. Basically making her a magic elf who exists in the novel solely as a functionary - taking care of her man and her family.
  
  More troubling still are Russo's African-American characters. Their contraction-laden speech lets you know that they're different from the book's protagonist (lest you confuse them), almost always an English professor or someone well-read. The black characters inhabit a world of menial labor and rough neighborhoods. If they interact with the main characters at all it's to teach them a lesson and help them along their way. The "Bridge of Sighs" contains just such a character, a "Magical Negro". This term was coined by the Onion's AV Club (
  http://www.avclub.com/content/feature...) and is used to describe an African-American character whose sole purpose is to help the white protagonist learn his or her lesson or reach some goal.
  
  So there's all of this to consider and to use as a grain of salt when I say that "Bridge of Sighs" is an almost perfect novel. The book is character driven, as is all of Russo's work. And Russo's characters and plots are often interchangeable. Academia, infidelity, illness, small-town life, and old friendships are themes present in Russo's oeuvre . And yet here the characters are people you feel you know - *want* to know.
  
  I was unable to sleep last night and as I lay in bed, worrying about the things you worry about when you can't sleep, I found myself thinking more and more of the characters in the novel and their plight, as if they existed and that plight was very real. I thought about Lucy's relationship with his mother and why he never gave her the credit that was due. I thought about Sarah and the life she might have had had she made different choices. I even thought about Dec, wondering what his cheap aftershave smelled like and if he might be smarter than he let on.
  
  I shan't give away too many details as the plot is deliberately twisty and meant to surprise you at turns. I don't kid myself in thinking that any of my friends would read this book. I wish they would but they won't. But someone else might see this and not want to know all the details in advance. I will say only that I am cynical, hyper-aware of racist and sexist subtexts, and adamantly repelled by chick-lit of any type (and really of girly things in general) and I still LOVED this book unabashedly.
• 
  Katie

  A rambling messy novel of almost 800 pages crying out for a rigorous editor which has probably scuppered my chances of meeting my reading challenge this year. I could have read three 250 page novels in the time it took me to finish this leviathan monster. There were times when I was impressed by Russo's storytelling abilities; others when I felt he had serious blindspots about what constitutes engaging storytelling and what's self-indulgently off-point and, at times, plain boring. It's a novel that has some engaging conflicts but that also runs off on dozens of tangents. At the 700 page mark I realised I was no longer much interested in what happens, which was a shame because earlier I had enjoyed the way he had set up nuanced oppositions between family members.
  
  It begins with a first person narrative. Lucy Lynch, a man, telling us about his childhood and in particular his friendship with Bobby. Reading between the lines we understand this was perhaps a one-sided friendship, made more intriguing by Bobby's father's loathing of Lucy and his family. We then jump to the present and a third person narrative of Bobby as an artist in Venice. The less said about the Venice parts of this book the better. What we get is a clichéd portrait of the artist as an elderly man and some flacid attempts at comic writing. There are three artists in this book, all of whom come from the same small town and not one of whom is entirely plausible. Many of the reconciliations are achieved through paintings and this too felt forced and clumsy. In fact, there were too many reconciliations and all of them dripping with a kind of shoehorned sentimentality. Another clumsy plot device was when we discover the first-person narrative is a book Lucy is writing. That means two characters in a novel about existence in a small backwater town are writing books and three are painters. Perhaps the author ought to inform himself about some other less glamorous vocations. We all know art can provide some semblance of final meaning - in fact, it's a tired old cliché - but I felt Russo was arbitrarily importing cosmopolitan friends of his into a small backwater town where they simply didn't ring true. In fact, the best and most engaging characters in this book were those who possessed no artistic gift. I also found his depiction of African Americans sentimental and patronising and self-admiring. I'm not sure why only their speech was written phonetically.
  Sometimes a good writer can write a not very good book. I've got strong hunch Russo has written better books than this and I chose the wrong one.
• 
  Mark Porton

  DNF @ 570 pages.
  
  I am so disappointed with this book, this character based fare - families, kids, jobs, working class town, hardship and more - had the ingredients to be interesting.
  
  But with 100 pages to go I couldn't take it anymore. Other authors such as Franzen paints his characters in fine detail - but Franzen's details all seem relevant. Other writers like Strout, use sparse language to equally brilliant effect.
  
  I found Russo's writing unnecessarily tangential, hyper- detailed, long winded and none of it interested me at all.
  
  I know people love this author and his work, but I tried for a week with this one and I just didn't form any attachment at all to the characters or the story. In fact, the superfluous content made me a little annoyed.
  
  I don't want to wake up tomorrow with more hard, unenjoyable reading ahead of me.
• 
  B the BookAddict

  In
  Bridge of Sighs, Russo takes you into a small upstate American town, Thomaston, and inside the lives of the Lynch family. This story is over decades and is a story with many stories. He moves the text easily between the present and the past and the different characters.
  
  The key characters are the Lynch family; Lou (Big Lou) and Tessa, son Lou C (Lucy), his wife Sarah and Bobby Marconi latterly known as Robert Noonan. Lucy, now 60, is writing his memoir and it is through this medium we learn of the early life of Big Lou and Tessa because as he says “A chronologial approach is best”. We follow their early life in the West End, the birth of Lucy, meet the Marconi's, Bobby, and the Lynch's move to the East End. Lou begins to change their fortunes by buying the run-down Ikey Lukins but Tessa is the economic brain: it is her ideas which result in the family's ultimate economic upturn. Perhaps Lucy's ongoing uneasy emotional relationship with Tessa is reflected here best. He resents that it is Tessa who turns the store around and paves their way financially; a role he may think his father owns.
  Bridge of Sighs is difficult to precis because it has many stories within a story and has so many characters.
  
  I found it interesting that Russo chooses to reflect the disparities of his Thomaston in the manner we see in so real many towns; east, the more affluent and west, the less. The town is bisected by the aptly named Division Street: to the east;The East End and The Boroughs, to the west: The West End and The Hill. Forty years ago, Thomaston's main economy came from the tannery; an industry that provided employment for most of the people of the West End. The tannery polluted the town's Cagoya Stream which ran daily in the colours the tannery used; red, yellow, blue. Thomaston is a town of many cancers and deaths for which the tannery is called into question and also regarding Lucy's 'spells': those blank periods of time where he appears to go off somewhere mentally: such 'spells' will remain with him for much of his life.
  
  Russo takes ordinary people, keeps them ordinary but still makes you want to read their story. He shows you a swathe of contrast in situations, characters and ethics. Russo has an incredible perception into people as revealed in the many characters and three generations of this novel. He shows the many intricacies of human relationships in his well-developed and very authentic characters. 4★
• 
  Steve

  With over 500 pages, and multidimensional profiles covering school days through to later years, a great writer like Russo can give you plenty to chew on. What I appreciated most was the rich contrast in character attitudes. Is it better to be an optimist offering the benefit of the doubt even if naively, or a pessimist giving the detriment of the doubt even if unfairly?
  
  Two of the main characters were artists. This gave Russo the chance to use their works to help interpret the story. It also brought analogies to mind. What kind of pictures would the author draw if he ever traded his keyboard for a sketchpad? I suspect he’d start with simple figures, then flesh them out with enough realism to see their true essence. Closer examination would reveal subtleties of tone and texture, with nary an affected flourish. Russo’s writing is always clear and unobtrusive. His greatest strength, though, is his insight into people and how he leads us to know them, too. He’s so good with the psychological descriptions that you may wonder whether the “show, don’t tell” rule was meant only for lesser lights than him, i.e., everyone else.
  
  A large part of the book focuses on two young guys who serve as the archetypes. They grow up in a fading industrial town in upstate New York – a crucible Russo’s readers know well. This town has the East side, West side, rich side, and black side. To be honest, the locational determinism was overplayed this time. Other influences rang true, though. For instance, Lucy (as Lou C. was dubbed by his classmates) was very much his father’s son. He had the same kind heart and magnanimous outlook as Big Lou. People-pleasing is the default when you’re averse to confrontation. Bobby, his counterpart, was much harder and braver; and wise to the ways of the world. Backing down was never an option for him. Lucy and Bobby had distinct biases, but were often perceptive about the people around them and, more importantly, even if intermittently, about themselves. If you could combine them to average out their extremes, you’d get a pretty decent meld as a result.
  
  The two main women in the story, Lucy’s mom and Sarah, Lucy’s girlfriend and friend of Bobby, were interesting, I thought. It was as though they were the judges in the contest between competing personality types and viewpoints. Fortunately, Russo gave them real lives and appealing traits so that you cared what judgments they made.
  
  I rate this one 4.51 stars, rounded to 5. Russo is almost always near the top of my list. I think Nobody’s Fool (4.98 stars) is better – certainly funnier – but this has similar pleasures. You get to see it all so knowingly as these compelling stories are told.
  
• 
  Margitte

  Sixty-year old Lucy Lynch (Louis Charles Lynch) lived in Thomaston, New York, a small town, for forty years, and experienced an even smaller place early in his life when fellow schoolmates closed him up in a trunk and left him there. Instead of being afraid, he made peace with it, discovered the comfort in claustrophobia, thereby scaring the living daylights out of these young schoolmates. However, it would lead to inexplicable 'spells' for the rest of his life.
  
  This story starts off with Lucy writing down his childhood memories. Lou is a repressed, self-deceptive, happy man. An unexciting, if loyal and unwavering, companion to his wife. Writing his memoir is taking longer than he anticipated, because 'he underestimated the tug of the past, the intoxication of memory, the attraction of explaining myself to, well, myself.
  
  While Lou is sharing his memories with the reader, other voices is added as a back drop to his memories. Bobby Marconi is one of them and later his wife's voice is added nearer to the end of the tale.
  
  As Lou's memoir unfolds, the more it turns into something he did not anticipate.

  The events of senior year in high school would steal our innocence, after which the losses would commence, Sarah’s father to disgrace; her mother to tragedy; Bobby, for us, at least, to Europe and fame; my father…my father to malignancy. I meant to write it all because I believed my life to be a hopeful story with a happy ending, the sort my father would’ve liked, where hard work and faith are rewarded, and the American virtues he most admired are triumphant. After all, Ikey’s prospered in the end, vindicating what he’d seen all along. As did our family. Sarah and I bought one of the houses on my father’s old milk route in the Borough, just as he said I might one day, if that was what I wanted. She and I married, as he wished, and we’ve had a son who’s a good, gentle man. All of this, every word, is true. It’s just not the whole truth, and I suppose that’s another reason to leave my story as it stands. Now, today, after the Bridge of Sighs, if I continued to write, it would end up being the story of my betrayal of the woman who has saved my life not once but over and over again. A betrayal that began, I fear, with our marriage.

  The book centers around the visit to Italy. How it came about and what the consequences would have been. Lou was not ready to go, for various reasons.
  
  He felt threatened, his world ripped apart by the idea of leaving his town for the very first time in his life. The well-established rythm of their adult lives will soon be violently interrupted when he and his wife leaves for Italy.
  
  He first has to finish the lifestory he is busy writing.the dullest story ever told, according to him. His fear of the unknown prevents him from going to Italy with his wife Sarah. In fact, he has a militant aversion for everything Italian. Sarah is the one force-feeding him bits of information from the travelbooks she has gathered around her.
  
  Lucy lives a life in a stack of boxes, like Matryoshka Nesting Dolls. One fitting into the other. The smaller the box, the happier he is. Yet, the tale is also the family history of the Lynches, three generations, who owned three convenience stores, called 'the Lynch Empire' by Owen, Lucy's son. The tale starts out with Lucy (Lou) and expand to his family members, his friends, and then the entire town. There is an interesting mix of blood: Irish and Italian.
  
  There is paradox in almost every part of the story. For instance, the Cayoga Stream, flowing through the town, emptying into the Barge channel, five miles outside town, is both life giving and life taking. The dyes and chemicals in the water caused cancer, yet provided jobs to most people. When the stream was clear, the town was worried. No polution, meant no jobs and lay offs followed by hardship. A leather factory kept many people employed, but also left most of them sick from the polluted water resulting from the tanning process. The factory has been closed for forty years and the town is slowly dying.
  
  There are many autobiographical elements in the book. It was, sort of, obvious since the very beginning. The author and his mother is an omnipresent in the story. The female characters play an important role in the lay of the land. Both genders form the eccentric multifaceted building blocks of the narrative. It is clear from the insight into the female characters that the author had a special relationship with his own mother, an umbilical cord that never snapped. It enriches the story tremendously and brings a depth of color to the bucolic narrative, most often accentuating the dark corners of the female psyche. His mother suffered from bipolar disorder , as well as OCD and he had to take care of her since a very young age. Alternatively, the male characters are present in all aspects male - an exhibit of the good, bad and evil in the hamlet of Testosterone.
  
  Apart from that, there is also the character of Bobby, who is rougly based on the life of Robert Noonan, who wrote the famous book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists under the pen name Robert Trussel. He grew up in Thomaston.
  
  The protagonist's character has a Norman Rockwell-feel - a complicated simplicity which is fascinating and captivating.
  
  Richard Russo is known for animating the interior lives of the burgs and hamlets of smalltown America. From the easy familiarity and security it can provide, to the eccentricities and cruelties it can spawn- Marcia Franklin in 'Dialogue' (Idaho Public Television).
  
  Mr. Russo also has a keen interest in the class system within the small town environment and manage to incorporate it into the towns, as characters, in his books. Small towns become the crucibles in which the poorest of the poor interact with the richest of the rich both in the positive and negative way.
  
  Since I was so aware of the autobiographical elements in the book, I went off to find more information on this compelling and compassionate writer. It doesn't often happen that the author demands more attention after being introduced to his stories for the first time. When I closed the book, I hopped onto the internet, discovering the author behind the complex and captivating saga. He created such complete people. Real people. He was born in Johnstown, and embedded his own experiences in the story, without giving his character a name. In fact, there is a little bit of himself in all the characters. His honesty is so refreshing. His insight into the human psyche is remarkable.
  
  While reading the story, I was thinking how great it would have been to be on the same level as this author as far as wisdom and attitude towards life is concerned. He understands the power of reading and how it changes lives. He was of the opinion that his mother cheated herself out of her own existence by becoming a voracious reader. She escaped depression and loneliness that way. It was a way out of being captured in a body and a mind she could not escape otherwise. She was literary enabled to live more than one life, while being jailed and caged not only in her own body, but also in a small town.
  
  With this information in mind, it is understandable why the book have so many interesting characters. The small-town environment not only provided a rich harvest of raw material, but also delivers enough challenges to build a great story. It is also reflected in the individuals in the book. Some have enormous challenges, but no resources to address them. They will not make it. Then there are the people who have these astonishingly privileged lives, without any challenges, which diminishes their moral scope.
  
  This book is my introduction to this author, and a great discovery. A rich and colorful landscape of America and its human investment. The only gripe I had was that it could have been shorter. The prose was excellent. I will read more books by this author for sure.
  
• 
  Cheri

  This is the type of book that, had I had the luxury of not having to do a damn thing other than read, I would have read this in a day or two. It's so easy to find something engrossing about his characters, both good and bad. As it was, I read this book in between trips since it's too big to fit in my carry-on luggage, so I've managed to drag it out for some time. Now that I'm finished, I'm only sorry about that. I feel like I've just walked away from an old friend knowing that I'll never see them again.
  But, that's Russo's magic. Every day in Russo's narrative world has all the ingredients to make it captivatingly comfortable.
• 
  Marialyce (and we we off to Italia!) 🛩️ 🇮🇹🍷

  I loved it! First book by Mr Russo and it was in a word wonderful. What a way with characters this author has! I loved each and every one of them. It was so very different from the previous character driven novel (Truly, Madly, Guilty) I read which bored me to tears. Goal for 2017 read more of his novels....
• 
  Algernon (Darth Anyan)

  
  To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it inevitability, drama’s enemy. Or so it seems to me, Louis Charles Lynch. The man I’ve become, the life I’ve lived, what are these but dominoes that fall not as I would have them but simply as they must?
  
  A man named Lucy reaches a crossroads in his journey through life. At the age of sixty, after four decades of a relatively happy marriage, with a reasonably successful business operating small grocery stores, he receives an invitation to visit Venice, residence of his childhood friend Bobby Marconi.
  Unlike Marconi, who left Thomaston after highschool, changed his name and became a world renowned modern painter as Robert Noonan, Louis Charles Lynch has never left the hometown, preferring to take over the struggling family business and play it safe in life. Now, as he looks back on a long life, Lucy must decide if it is too late to take chances and be impulsive or if he will retract once more inside his protective shell, like a threatened turtle. So he starts to write his memoirs, the history of Thomaston and the history of the people who live there, as he witnessed it.
  
  Thomaston, New York, is a place you’ve never heard of, unless you’re a history buff, an art lover or a cancer researcher.
  
  To me, reading about Thomaston is a lot like reading about my hometown, just like reading about the distressed families living there is a lot like revisiting the street I grew up on. For historians, Thomaston is the place of an infamous massacre during the early Indian Wars. [Ploiesti is first mentioned in the 1600s as a military camp for King Michael the Brave, on his campaign to unite the three territories inhabited by Romanians and split between the Hungarian, Turkish and Russian Empires]. To art lovers, Thomaston is the birth place of the renowned painter Robert Noonan. [We boast of a playwright, I L Caragiale, and a poet, Nichita Stanescu] . For the medical profession, Thomaston is a breeding ground of terminal illness, caused by the local tanneries and dye factories. [Ploiesti was once home to eleven refineries plus several chemical plants].
  
  The true link between fiction and reality is in the setting that has become a sort of Russo trademark: the small town that was once prosperous, but becomes impoverished when the main industries move some place else. The blue-collar families left behind are struggling to make ends meet, and the economical struggle is reflected in the personal dramas between generations.
  
  My parents had always argued about money, since no matter how hard they worked we came up short at the end of the month. My father wasn’t a spendthrift, but saving for a rainy day wasn’t in his nature. To his way of thinking, the sun was shining most of the time. My mother had inherited from her parents the exact opposite view. To her, a sunny day was a rarity. Tomorrow it would rain, and the only question was how hard.
  
  The sense of familiarity with the setting and with the characters goes for me beyond the immediate social parallels. Somehow, Richard Russo knows how to strike a chord, either with the childhood recollections or with the struggle to remain an optimist in a world full of hard rains. I was never bullied in childhood and called mean names the way Lucy was, but it was easy to see myself in the boy who took refuge in books [mostly easy, adventure reads] instead of facing up to reality.
  
  That summer I also became a denizen of the Thomaston Free Library. Always a reader, I now borrowed six books every Saturday morning – the maximum allowable. At night I’d read until my mother made me turn out the light, then wake up early and read until it was time to bathe and eat breakfast and go to school.
  
  >>><<<>>><<<
  
  There is no such thing as a lesser Richard Russo novel, at least not to us fans of the author. I might admit, under pressure, that he recycles heavily on setting, characterization and plot, but like a master craftsman who casts the same mould for a vase or a jewel over and over again, until he gets it to perfection, or as close to it as his art permits. I might even add that the present story is slightly too long, a slow burner that depends heavily on how much the reader gets invested in the fate of the characters. But it was nevertheless an immersive experience, beautifully written and rich in nuance and emotional impact.
  
  The Marconis, the Lynches, the Beverlys and the Bergs. Not one of these families would emerge unscathed from the collision. Only one would survive intact.
  
  Bridge of Sighs is a famous Venice landmark, one that probably Richard Noonan passes by regularly in his walks through town. Like the first quote I used, the title of the novel implies some sort of inevitability of Fate, of children doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents and of circumstances trumping good intentions.
  
  Sarah and Noonan were veteran observers of marital dysfunction, and Lucy’s parents had struggled mightily for a long time to keep Ikey’s afloat. But to Nan economic uncertainty and parental discord were brand-new.
  
  You can try to deny the facts, like the easy-going Big Lou Lynch, who was liked by everybody but considered a bit of a simpleton. Or you can hide behind the walls of a mansion in the rich part of town, like Nan Beverly. Or you can try to do your best with the cards that you were dealt, like Sarah Berg. Or you can run away, like Bobby Marconi, to be forever hunted by ghosts from your past, ghosts that you try to exorcise through your art.
  
  “Why paint something no one will ever buy, that’s what I’d like to know. It’s lunatic. You should stop painting this. I mean it. In fact, I forbid you to continue. Let’s burn it right now, shall we?”
  
  Where do Louis Charles Lynch and Sarah Berg fit in this struggling Thomaston? One is an optimist like his cherished father, the other a pragmatist like her mother, yet together they seemed to have built something durable. Or had they?
  
  Maybe everyone was like that. Maybe lies were necessary to survival. [...]
  “He may already know,” my wife says, taking me by surprise. “People know things and pretend not to.”Am I mistaken, or is she speaking not only of our son and me but also of herself?
  
  Richard Russo looks at the equation from multiple perspectives, taking us all the way back to the earliest childhood memories, most of them of the traumatic variety. I found the attention to detail and the different takes on the same event from different actors to be very rewarding, in particular the school years for Lucy, Bobby and Sarah who will later form a variant of the eternal love triangle to add more drama to their personal lives.
  
  What makes this story special among other similar stories from the same author is I believe the long-term wounds left by school bullying and by home abuse, with a vicious dose of racism thrown in [Gabriel]. Dysfunctional families are another staple of Russo, but I thought this novel was a lot better at the portrait of women in a setting that usually focuses on men. The other original angle is the expat artist perspective of Noonan, more cosmopolite and more subversive, aggressively intelligent than the resigned, introverted perspective of Lucy. Of interest to the art lover might also be the mention that Carravaggio’s ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ is Noonan’s favourite painting. It made me read up more on the Italian Master. Finally, I already mentioned Lucy’s love of books, but some of my favourite pages describe his growth from an escapist reader to an analytical one, under the dubious but brilliant tutelage of Sarah’s father, a teacher at the local highschool.
  
  “Ahab’s speech on the quarterdeck. You were supposed to have read it for today.”
  
  Religion doesn’t play a major part in the novel, unless you count a passage that once again seems addressed directly to me, and echoes my own thoughts on how to approach this thorny subject.
  
  Her family was Jewish, she said. They didn’t practice the religion but instead something her father called humanism, which was more of a belief system. They didn’t go to church, just put their faith in what her dad called the fundamental nobility of man. They ate pork chops like we did, Sarah gave me to understand, and also celebrated Christmas, at least as a season of fellowship, even if they didn’t, as humanists, subscribe to the notion of Jesus being God or anything like that. That he was good was full and sufficient. People who believed that good wasn’t good enough, that Jesus had to be God, were the ones who gave us the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.
  
  Coexist, as that car decal says, and we’ll have fewer wars and pogroms.
  
  This is a very long and tumultuous story, with plenty of interesting characters, so it’s hard to resume it to a single line without leaving much of the exciting things out, but I do have a final quote to conclude on the life story of Louis Charles Lynch:
  
  When someone knows your deepest self and still loves you, are you not a lucky man?
  
  Cue the Emerson, Lake & Palmer song for the end credits.
  
• 
  Kim

  When I finished reading Richard Russo's wonderful novel Empire Falls (for which he won the Pulitzer), I wondered - how will this novelist do this again? Turns out, he just keeps getting better. One thing I've always admired about Russo is his ability to write about small towns in a way that honors the provincial nature of small town life while exploring all of its intricacies and nuances, its complexity and heartache - the way a person can live a wide life in the smallest of ponds. Perhaps this is because Russo understands that the human heart is the widest of oceans. In Bridge of Sighs, Russo explores another small town, in this case Thomaston, NY - but he widens his own palette with one of his small town characters moving away and living in Venice, Italy. Of course, a person can't escape his own heart, even when he changes geography.
  
  In all of his novels that I've read, Russo unfolds a story slowly and Bridge of Sighs is no different. Russo's patience as a novelist is perhaps his biggest asset. This is a novel to be savored, to be pondered. But what I find most remarkable about Russo is his ability to be unexpectedly profound. I told my husband that he is like the sweetest of sensibilities masked in a Budweiser and day old stubble. He is at once all rough edges and masculinity but also deeply sweet and emotive. His beauty is in the details, in the way he wraps this world around you with words and makes you take a long swim in this story alongside all these lives, all fully formed, all deeply complex, all flawed. No villains. No heroes.
  
  Ultimately, this is a novel of redemption and great sadness, of happiness in the small details that make up a life - the search for greatness within the smallness of ourselves. It's about finding our way. Of course, this all sneaks up on you. Russo infers in the novel that people seek "a small, good thing" - that this is what the human heart yearns for. That ultimately, a person's happiness often hinges on recognizing what this "small, good thing" is - and on letting it fill you up, sustain you. Letting it be enough. Well, Mr. Russo: One of my small, good things is reading a novel like yours for which I can marvel and be grateful.
• 
  Karen

  The Bridge of Sighs is one long-ass bridge. I suppose once you win a Pulitzer Prize, you don't have to submit to pesky things like editing. In this case, though, it would have been beneficial. The book was too long, and weirdly repetitive. I still dig Russo's writing, for the most part, and the way he can describe all the unspoken things that go on within people's relationships. That's amazing. But I was done with the book about 200 pages before he was. I finished, but only because I had some fondness for the characters and wanted to see what happened to them, not because I was relishing the book anymore. In particular, Sarah's journey that starts in the chapter called "The Blue Door" was really annoying to me -- it felt very Oprah's book-club-ish, not in keeping with the rest of the book. Anyway, I'm glad I'm done.
• 
  Julie

  Reading this book is like slipping on your favorite pair of jeans- the ones you never wash to keep them perfect softly and loose, donning a beloved sweatshirt and thinking "I wish I lived the sort of life that I could wear these clothes every day..." Meaning that (if you like Russo, of course) these characters, this setting, the storyline are so comforting and familiar- it's like coming home.
  
  Which isn't to say that there aren't surprises, that it isn't fresh, nuanced and captivating. It's a been a definite page turner for me- only work and the other vagaries of life have kept me from finishing it over the weekend.
• 
  Mack

  I am glad i put this one on my reading list. It is beautifully written and has a lot to say about our daily lives and our relationships between parents and children. It covers three generations of a story about two boys growing up in the 1950-60s. Though a slow but dense plot, it has a lot of memorable characters with imperfect hearts living in an imperfect world.
• 
  Michael Finocchiaro

  I have been a Russo fan for quite a while and was not disappointed with
  Bridge of Sighs which he published five years after the tremendous (and deservedly so) success of his Pulitzer winning
  Empire Falls. He sticks with his back-country, small-town New York state atmosphere (much like Richard Ford and New Jersey or John Updike and western Pennsylvania) with the lovable, acutely nostaglic Lou Charles "Lucy" Lynch and his putative friend, Bobby Noonan, né Marconi in the dying town of Thomaston, NY. As in many of Russo's novels, the town is changing and dying with the arrival of superstores and the slow, excruciating death of the downtown area. Lucy's father owns a grocery mart and struggles to make ends meet without succumbing to the temptation of running numbers out the back like his predecessor or having lottery machines, as his son will do later.
  
  The story is told from the perspectives of Lucy and Bobby whose paths intersect, diverge, intersect and diverge until the bitter end of the story. The book is written with the raw humanity that I loved about
  Nobody's Fool, an accurate depiction of the local speech inflections and attitudes that really put me into the heart of the story and kept my interest cover to cover.
  
  Some have accused Russo of both racism and misogyny. As for this particular book, he gives a sympathetic and, IMO, non-condescending portrait of the pitifully few people of color that cross Lucy's life back home. As for misogyny, the female characters are sometimes harpies but they can also be fully human and vindicated like both Lucy's mother and his wife. Perhaps his other work shows these defaults, but I didn't find it the case with this one.
  
  The title comes from a dream that Lucy has as he reaches across the Bridge of Sighs in Venice to try to be in contact with his father. A beautiful and strong metaphor, particularly since Noonan lives in Venice. Some have suggested that there was an unrequited homosexual attraction of Lucy for Bobby, and this might be the case, but if so it was rather subtle. I just really enjoyed the four-dimensionality of all the characters and how, personally, I was swept up into the story and the various foibles of the characters while enjoying it.
  
  A great read for fans of Russo.
• 
  Elizabeth (Alaska)

  There is a stone bridge in Venice, Italy they call the Bridge of Sighs. it connects the Doge's Palace in St. Mark's Square, where there are interrogation rooms, to an adjacent prison. Crossing this bridge, the convicts - at least the ones without money or influence - came to understand that all hope was lost. According to legend, their despairing sighs could be heard echoing in the neighboring canals.
  
  Strangely enough, I never felt that "all hope was lost" while reading this book. Quite the contrary. Louis Charles Lynch was called Lucy all his life. The kindergarten teacher, calling the roll, called out Lou C. Lynch, he answered "here", and a student asked, "his name is Lucy?". We learn this because Lucy begins writing a memoir. As with every childhood, there is both joy and sadness.
  
  "Bottomless need. What Miss Rosa didn't seem to understand was that this accurately described not only most children but also the scared child that lives, at least part of the time, deep inside most adults."
  
  about parents: "You know all their secrets? What they're thinking? . . . Would you say you know them as well as you know yourself? . . . And how well would you say you know yourself?"
  
  "Is it better to love or be loved?"
  
  Bridge of Sighs is a book that makes you look inward, to search yourself. And when you do, you're likely to come back feeling much better about yourself.
• 
  Jess The Bookworm

  This book was not what I was expecting at all. I confess that I picked it up in the library because of the name, because I am going to Venice in a few months' time. It is not set in Venice, but rather it is set in the small town of Thomaston, New York.
  
  This little town has residents which love it, despite the fact the river runs red and causes cancer. One such resident, Lou C. Lynch (Lucy), is the main character of this book, a man who idolises the town and his father, choosing to see the most positive side of everything.
  
  This book is more about its characters than an intricate plot, delving deeply into complex human relationships. It is done so well that, even though I didn't necessarily agree with a character's choices, I felt very connected to them, and thought about them for a long time afterwards. It's only afterwards that you think more carefully about the underlying themes of this book, and I think that this is the true sign of a great novel.
  
  It was wonderfully written and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 
  Carrie

  Oh my STARS!!!!!!!! I am finally done -- thank GOD. This is the longest book in the history of mankind. It was good, but not good enough to read every single word. No one REALLY cares about EVERY SINGLE thought and EVERY SINGLE memory of EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER. OH MY GOD. I honestly skimmed the last 30 pages; I couldn't take it anymore. I AM SO GLAD IT IS OVER.
• 
  Josh

  I was a little apprehensive about this book after reading the press it received. I knew I would enjoy it, but I seeing that involved a middle-aged man reflecting on his life in a dying New England town, I feared a retread of Empire Falls.
  
  I couldn't have been more wrong. Many of the elements you would expect from Russo are there, the quiet politics of small towns, the relationship between parents and children and even the tainted river are all present. But Russo expands on these and builds them into an amazing work, which may be his very best.
  
  The story focuses on three friends in a small upstate New York town. In many ways, it is a coming of age story twice-over. We gradually see how they grow up and grow together, but this is told as all three of them deal with their changing lives entering their 60s.
  
  In many ways, Lou's tale reminds me less of Empire Falls, as I had feared, and more of John Irving's Until I Find You. In the beginning of the book, he is setting out to recount his childhood. We learn through the involvement of his best friend and future wife, as they recount their lives, that what he remembers as a child is largely a matter of perception. As opposed to Irving's manner of portraying the same idea by telling the story of a childhood, and then going back through it a second time with the main character learning the truth, Russo builds the revelations almost seamlessly into the story.
  
  One of the most important themes of the book is what we take away from our parents and our relationship with them. Do we know who are parents are? Do we slowly become them? What do we take from them? Each of the central characters is faced through their young lives with elements–sometimes contrary ones–of their parents personas, and for each of them, the growth of the story is reconciling this as adults.
• 
  ☮Karen

  This is the story of Lou C. Lynch (aka Lucy, unfortunately) who grew up in upstate New York before Civil Rights and the women's movement. The setting and the characters will remind you of Russo's previous work Empire Falls, again borrowing from his own biography. As Lou and his wife Sarah prepare for a trip to Italy, he is remembering the childhood friend whom they hope to visit... also recalling his very average, very middle class childhood, going from life in the rough and gritty West End part of town to the better-but-not-quite-made-it-yet East End. The interactions with people from all walks of life are a constant reminder of where their place once was and could be again, if dealt a bad hand. The parallel story of Lou's old friend adds another dimension, and we see the value of longtime friendships.
  
  Russo is expert at delving into the dynamics of relationships, and, especially in the books that I have read, mother-son relationships. Usually I have detested his mother figures whom the sons seemed to patiently endure. Here I really liked his mother a lot--a strong, sensible woman; but Lou empathized more with his father, a sweet gentle soul who was either incapable of making a decision or always seemed to make them poorly. As others pine to get out of town, Lucy is perfectly content and has spent all of his 60 years there. I was glad to have shared some time there these last several days that it took to listen to the book.
  
  It did feel drawn out toward the end, and in a book concentrating on the minutia of small town America, it is a risk to go on so long. Despite my thinking there was too much minutia, Russo still delivers, throwing in some surprises, although nothing earth shattering.
• 
  Nancy (Hrdcovers)

  BRIDGE OF IMPRISONMENT
  
  Is this what Richard Russo is trying to tell us in picking out the title of this book? Are you also someone who tries to analyze the title of each book you read as I do? Built in the 16th century in Venice, The Bridge of Sighs is the last thing a prisoner walks over before reaching his cell. The idea behind the name is that the last view a convict sees before imprisonment is a beautiful Venetian canal which must cause him to sigh at its beauty, never to be seen again until said prisoner is released -- if ever.
  
  The setting of this book is not Venice but Thomaston, New York, site of a prosperous tannery in post-war America but now, many years later, is a company that polluted the Cayoga Stream. The main character is Lou C. (Lucy) Lynch and Russo tells us, right off the bat, that Lucy has never left Thomaston in all his sixty years. Unlike the prisoners in Venice, Lucy is certainly not a prisoner, although it could be viewed, that he is, in fact, a prisoner of his own choosing in a town he just can't leave.
  
  Russo is so great at writing about small town America and living the American dream. He's right up there for me with my other favorite authors, Pat Conroy and John Irving. Some might complain that there's too much prose and not enough dialogue in his books but, for this reader, I could read Russo's prose all day long. In Bridge of Sighs, the story is told from the point of view of two narrators, Lucy Lynch and Bobby Marconi. After three hundred pages, Russo decides to give another point of view in the voice of Sarah Berg, Lucy's future wife. I don't usually like when an author does this but, in this case, it works and it works well.
  
  I love when an author has one of his characters writing a book about his own life because it makes it easy for him to easily offer a glimpse of his past life and, in this case, that of the town as well. In Lucy's past life, we come to understand all the workings of the Lynch family, a family who can only be admired for their pursuit of the American dream. While Lucy's father is the eternal optimist and Lucy's mother the eternal realist, their son is tried and true like his father and refuses to believe that there can be bad in the world. Perhaps this is the reason he never leaves his hometown.
  
  Unlike Lucy, Bobby Marconi does leave and becomes a famous artist in Venice. My one complaint here is, in doing so, he changes his name to Robert Noonan (his mother's maiden name) and I could never justify this change in my head and couldn't relate to Bobby as Robert. Of course, the choice of Venice brings us back to that famous Bridge of Sighs as Bobby has been released from the hold of Thomaston while his boyhood friend Lucy still remains.
  
  I could analyze Bridge of Sighs until I'm blue in the face but then I'd feel like I'm writing yet another English paper. I highly recommend this book as I would highly recommend any Richard Russo book. I felt very invested in all the characters and did let out a sigh of my own when I had finished the book.....a sigh that meant I was sad that I wasn't going to be spending any more time with the indomitable Lynch's. So I guess, in essence, I walked over my own Bridge of Sighs in finishing this book.
  
  
  
• 
  RandomAnthony

  This might be my longest review ever. Here we go, in bullet points...
  
  1. I like Russo's work a lot, esp. Straight Man, Nobody's Fool, and Risk Pool. Nobody writes about rundown small towns better than Russo. In the three books already mentioned Russo doesn't overshoot his purpose; he's funny and psychologically incisive without becoming ponderous, although he can be rightfully accused of painting a rosier picture than his settings warrant. Bridge of Sighs, also set in a small town, aims higher and sometimes (but not always) succeeds.
  
  2. Bridge of Sighs, a fairly long book (642 pages), interweaves many characters and multiple generations. Russo is particularly strong with secrets and the ways in which individuals discover their own truths over longer periods of time. He also tackles artistic processes, particularly painting, as insights into the minds of some characters' evolution.
  
  3. I sometimes think Russo will be the kind of guy read in colleges 100 years from now when people want to learn about America in the early part of this century. The possibility has pros and cons. I think Russo does an excellent job with his subject matter but some metaphors slap you in the face. I can see some bored book club housewife jumping up and down saying "This means THAT! Oh, I get it!"
  
  So I can recommend Bridge of Sighs if you can handle Russo's sentimental side. He writes well about subjects (e.g. families, communities, etc.) that hipper writers won't touch unless it's in an ironic, detached manner, and he deserves credit for his work and sensitivity. However, if you've never read Russo before, I'd probably start with one of his earlier (and shorter) books to see if he's your thing.
  
  
• 
  Jeremy

  This is Russo's best book.
  
  He does a couple things in this book that are impressive on both a technical and human level.
  
  That Russo can lovingly create deep and human characters has been established in all of his novels. What's truly amazing about Bridge of Sighs is the amount of depth he gives to nearly every character in the book. At the beginning of the novel we see the story from the perspective of only a couple characters. During this time, many of the characters seem predictable and shallow, conveniently slotted into the traditional roles of good guy, bad guy, supporting cast, etc. As the novel moves on the perspective changes and the reader is forced to change the way they think about nearly every person as we learn more and more about them. It seems like Russo truly cares for every one of his characters and wants the reader to as well. He wants to make sure, however, that you know what you're getting into by loving these people, so there flaws are clearly displayed.
  
  Bridge of Sighs is, at it's core, a psychological novel. The character's motives for their actions and their reaction to events are the heart and soul of the novel. The major plot points are often recounted several at a time in single paragraphs, while the build-ups and aftermaths have entire chapters devoted to them. In spite of this fact, Russo manages to make this novel compelling enough that you'll not want to stop reading.
  
  One of the recurring theme's in Russo's work is the creation of characters. We create a role for ourselves through choices that we make on a daily basis. In the end we wind up somewhere we'd have never imagined, playing a role we'd never dreamed. Russo manages to embrace the beauty and peace-of-mind that playing such a role brings us, and at the same time remind us that stepping out of our roles is often the best way to truly be ourselves.
• 
  Eric

  This was my first Russo novel and won't be the last.
  
  Sometimes the dynamic of a family in a small town makes for the some of the most interesting stories. In the beginning, it is teased that the main action of the story may move to Venice (as the title implies), but that never really happens. This story is about a small town in New York, and the coming of age (and old age) of Louis C. ("Lucy") Lynch. It's also about his wife, his best friend, his parents, small town prejudices, and how love is complicated by other feelings. How unresolved ambiguities are part of life. How life is bittersweet and all the more worth it for that reason.
  
  Russo understands all of his characters on a deep level, and makes sure that we do too. By the time you finish this book, there are no villains, and everyone has taken his or her shot at being a hero. Like Lou's mother, Tessa, we see both the bad and the good in all the characters, and love them anyway. That's the way it should be.
  
  Tip for fans of Pat Conroy: Richard Russo is probably right up your alley.
  
  Reading this novel, with its depiction of small city life, prompted me to give my son a driving tour of my home town, East Liverpool, Ohio yesterday after our workout. I don't know if my ramblings and looking at the much-changed city helped him imagine what it was like to grow up there, but I made the attempt.
• 
  Jonathan K (Max Outlier)

  Not what I had hoped for after reading "Straight Man"
• 
  Chris Gager

  I decided to read this one before tackling "Beloved". This will be a bit lighter I suppose. It starts out sounding like "Straight Man", with its middle-aged first-person narrator. The first two Russo books I read were 3rd person and the next two(including this) - 1st person. We start out back in upstate New York in a small town with little going on. In other words... familiar Russo territory.
  
  Moving along... this book has the usual Russo virtue of readability. When he sticks to the story of Lucy's family and Thomaston it's quite compelling but... as soon as he got going on the life of the ex-pat American painter Noonan(i.e. Bobby Marconi) I became dismayed. The last time this came for me up was in my failed attempt to get through "Underworld". One of the reasons I put that book down was the portrayal of the painter... the "New York artist". A crap-pile of clichés that RR gets trapped inside as he tries to paint us a picture of middle-aged Noonan in Venice: angry, drunken, selfish, womanizing(including the wives of friends/acquaintances) etc. But OH SO TALENTED(of course). For once and for all let me say that painters are interesting for what they do, not for who they are. They do NOT make for interesting fiction. Biography... maybe. The very same might be said for the character of Richard, the bohemian musician and best friend in "Freedom". Another boring cliche'...
  
  As soon as we got back to Lucy and his story things pick up again but now that we(I) know that Noonan is important I'll have a bad taste to overcome as I read more of his story. It'll be a challenge for Russo to overcome the obstacle he has set up for himself but we'll see. In the intros he thanks somebody who he claims "saved" this book. Maybe...
  
  - the trunk scene reminds of the sex-ed scene in "Plainsong/Eventide".
  
  - Lucy's fugues remind of Will Barnett in "The Last Gentleman/The Second Coming".
  
  - foodish name dropping in Italy - zabaglione.
  
  - It's tough for me to read about nasty a-holes in these "dirty-fiction" narratives. Like Nick's abominable wife in "Underworld" or Noonan here.
  
  - Lucy's Mom is a great character - realistic about America. The Dad's pretty well drawn too.
  
  - Hey! I got an English(3-speed) bike too. On my 10th birthday. I promptly went out and wrecked it!
  
  - Big Lou = Big Baby but a good guy. Needed taking care of...
  
  - What about the trestle(one of the titular bridges) and Bobby? The author is withholding evidence via the tool of traumatic amnesia. We already can guess...
  
  - Painting the fence! Like Tom Sawyer...
  
  - Jitterbugging in the early 60's?????
  
  - It must be interesting and possibly VERY distracting to put one's mind so firmly in the look-back mode while trying to write about the past. Lou's life and mine(and Russo's) began at the same time and in the same general place(Small town northeast America in the 1950's). Same fears and challenges... bullies... family strife... girls. Big difference in parents though. Lucy's family was poorer than mine but the parents had a lot more to give him. Every baby boomer has an overarching cultural similarity to their story plus many unique challenges on our individual paths.
  
  Stayed up late last night as I was reluctant to put down this engrossing book. Some familiar motifs are here: the two brothers in business; the small town facing economic difficulties and change; the past with its many secrets; the mysteries(to children) of adult lives etc. RR slowly amps up the emotional stakes as he goes along and one may be moved if one is of a mind and heart to be. Works for me! The author wisely is sticking to the Thomaston side of things after introducing Noonan-in-Venice. Now we get his and Sarah's story back at about 1963-64. My time too...
  
  - makes mention of North Bath and Mohawk...
  
  - Karen = Annette Funicello
  
  - The Lou-Gabriel conversation about "pussy" seems a bit contrived and precious but Russo does his best to paint a realistic and workable picture of race relations in Thomaston. It ain't pretty. No mention so far of legal action against Perry(Buddy too for that matter)... How come? Reminds me of Plainsong/Eventide where small-town evil-doers seem to get away with it.
  
  - I like Lou's story(i.e. childhood) and his not being able to tell up from down.
  
  - The small-town-through-time setting reminds me of Mt. Judge and Brewer in the Rabbit books. The best I ever read in that genre.
  
  - Russo knows how to slip the sad stuff in quietly but firmly.
  
  - Lou's Mom's dislike of Bush the Younger is likely Russo's as well.
  
  - This is an epic like Empire Falls but takes place more in the past than that one. Also more intimate - like Nobody's Fool - not so many characters as EF.
  
  - A significant difference(I assume) is that that this book is much closer to the psychic bone for the author. Seems likely that there's a lot of RR's own life in this story. As with "Straight Man."
  
  This continues to be an up-and-down book(as longish books tend to be). Whenever RR leaves Thomaston his mojo seems to weaken and I long to be back "home". That's where the best "action" is! Sarah's story gets going and takes us to Long Island and lingers there too long. Sarah's mother is not an interesting character either. Then she comes back and it's teenager-ville with awkward, stilted, inauthentic and too-adult sounding dialogue and internal monologue(Bobby). It's not that easy to capture the teen-ager thing and really, they aren't that interesting except to each other. But then things tend to settle out as we return to the over-arching saga of the Lynch family and Thomaston. This book continues to move me more than any RR book so far. Closer to my heart as well as the author's(I suspect).
  
  - Tessa's the Greek chorus here...
  
  - So... Three didn't die - yet...
  
  - Theresa Lupino = a tribute to the gorgeous Ida Lupino, the first "serious" female Hollywood director?
  
  - The love triangle - Bobby-Sarah-Lou - reminds of "Freedom" again.
  
  - Noonan is unlikeable even as a teenager. He just gets worse as he gets older. The irony(of course) is that he's very much like his father. An awful person.
  
  - Would a 17-year old Noonan think that Lucy's taste in books was "juvenile"? Noonan seems to come across as too adult for his age - not believable. He has far too much insight.
  
  - Sarah's drawing of her mother is what art's about... telling the truth. Look at Rembrandt's self-portraits!
  
  - The Harold scenario rings a bell. I too had a step-father named Harold!
  
  - Sarah's father might be too much of a lunatic. Again... is it realistic?
  
  - And dear Tessa - so, so co-dependent. Lives in fear and doesn't know how to mind her own business! Constantly trying to manipulate people's lives.
  
  Stayed up too late last night to finish this one off as it semi-staggered to its present-day conclusion. Certainly this book was "messier" than the three I'd read previously and at the end RR chose to follow Sarah's path to the endgame. Seems like the first time he's done that. Female characters had always been vital to his books but the guy was always the central character. As I stated before, this book was more obviously moving than the previous ones I'd read and there's more individual, familial and social trauma. Still, the ending cautiously upbeat despite all the suffering and death. There are some surprising survivors as well as plenty of lost sailors, including some who go w/o explanation(Marconi, Dec, Mr. Berg). Others just go away without having had much impact(Nan, Three Mock) except as symbols. I'm not sure that I "get" the point of the book, if there is one. It's about small towns in the northeast, love, family and relationships. The usual RR schtick... And I liked it! 3.75* rounds up to 4*
  
  - Again... would a teen-aged boy think of his girlfriend as being "deeply conflicted"?
  
  - The Noonan-Sarah stuff IS about teenagers. The emotional intensity makes the memories intense.
  
  - Too much about Nan and HER story...
  
  - Seems to be some confusion at the end about people and events. Was there more than one David???
  
  - Too much stuff going on at the end as things get a bit out of control. Why write about women(or black people) from the inside if you're not one of them?
  
  - Back to Sarah's story at the end. It's kind of touching if a bit random and "novelly", with an ending hook like Mansfield Park!
  
  - How many bloody noses in this book?
• 
  Megan

  I am a huge fan of Richard Russo, so I wanted to love this one. Although, as usual, Russo paints a vivid picture of small town life, somehow the story never grabbed me. Centered on Lou "Lucy" Lynch, a typical Russo lovable loser, we hear the story of his life in a class-conscious upstate New York town. We also get snippets of the life of his best friend, a painter in Venice who escaped the small town. But the story, while solidly told, is never particularly moving. Nothing much happens, and there is not much growth in Lou, despite our following him from early youth to late in life. He starts out an amiable, but gullible kid, and grows into an amiable but gullible adult. The triangle that develops between his first love and best friend (arguably his *real* first love) could have been interesting but somehow, sadly, isn't. I will be waiting for Russo's next novel, and maybe re-reading my early favorite The Risk Pool.
• 
  Jason Pettus

  (My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
  
  As regular readers know, artistic criticism is something fairly new to me (or at least regular artistic criticism is), with the entire thing being as much of a learning process for me as it often is for you; and of all the new things I am learning about the subject these days, one of the most surprising is of just how strongly our opinion of a project is influenced by which station in life we ourselves are at when coming across it. For example, as someone who tries to heavily cover the field of "indie lit" or "underground lit" or whatever you want to call it, I am of course constantly coming across novels designed to appeal primarily to those in their twenties, full of gimmicks and pop-culture references and other signs of its young demographics; and every time I come across one of these books, I always think about how much more it would've appealed to me at the age of 23 then it currently does at 38, and how what I write about it is heavily influenced by that. What I'm learning, in fact, is that the best critics must learn how to balance this subject when it comes to their finished essays -- that the most effective reviews are the ones that can take all kinds of different audience attitudes in mind while still acknowledging the biases of that specific reviewer, without apologizing for either aspect but rather trying to synthesize the two as much as possible.
  
  A very good example of what I'm talking about, in fact, can be seen in today's novel under review, former Pulitzer winner Richard Russo's latest hefty saga about small-town life, Bridge of Sighs; because let's make it clear right off the bat, that this is a slow-moving academic-friendly novel about a bunch of old people in a rural east-coast environment, who spend most of their time sitting around and thinking about old-person stuff, a novel that if I had come across in my early twenties would've been highly tempted to scoff at and roll my eyes. Now that I'm in the lower rungs of middle-age, however, I found myself a lot more intrigued; I ended up liking the book quite a bit, to tell you the truth, although acknowledge that it has some serious flaws when it comes to the plotting of the overall storyline (but more on that in a bit). And what's even more, I can tell that I'm not even the main target audience to begin with -- that in actuality, this novel is primarily designed to appeal to people in their fifties and sixties, those just entering the winter of their lives for the first time, naturally obsessed with looking over the whole of their adulthoods, ruminating on where things went right and where they went wrong. And so that leads to an intriguing question -- that as a guy just now entering his forties, with a huge section of readership in their twenties and thirties, what exactly should I say about a book like this? Do I recommend it but with an asterisk? Do I suggest skipping it but with a caveat? Sheesh, who knew that being an artistic critic was such a hard job?!
  
  I guess, then, let's start with this, that Russo is in fact precisely known for gentle slow-moving ruminations on small-town life; that's what his Pulitzer-winning novel was about as well, after all, 2001's Empire Falls, as well as...
• 
  D'Anne

  I really love Richard Russo and really enjoyed this book but felt it went on a little too long at the end -- like a good friend who you love to spend time with but who stays maybe a day longer than he should because as much as you love him you've got work to do. And yet, you can hardly be too upset because this friend says things like:"[T]here is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. Blame love."
  
  I thought it was interesting that both this book and Ann Patchett's latest, Run, which both came out around the same time, feature a young black girl who has a talent for running and who is adopted by older white folks. A strange coincidence, I thought. Russo's is by far the better book when compared to Run, but not nearly as good as Russo's own Straight Man or Empire Falls.