Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

“Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice…But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity…And yet not all mystery is lost, nor all meaning. Regardless of our vantage point, some events manage to retain their drama and significance.”

Let me start off by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed every Richard Russo book that I have read. My favorite being Straight Man (because who doesn’t love a professor that threatens to strangle ducks?). Of course, Russo is known for writing about small town New England settings, in which there emerges a character that feels unsettled with the sleepy, old-fashioned environment he finds himself in (masculine, because Russo’s protagonists are always men, the women being pictured more as beings always guilty of or at least suspected of adultery). The man in this particular story is Lucy (a cruel childhood nickname short for Lou C.). The interesting thing about Bridge of Sighs is that it follows several storylines, instead of focusing on a singular character, like most of Russo’s books. Not only does the story fluctuate between characters, but also between timelines.

The book begins in the present day, where Lucy is married to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. While planning a trip to Italy, they contact their old friend Noonan. Soon after, the book plunges back in time about 40 years, recalling Lucy’s childhood in great detail. This includes how he was terrorized as a child, his tenacious and conditional friendship with Noonan, and the conflicts that arose between his mother and father, who suffers from being slow of wit (more in the sleepy town sense). This constantly leads to conflict between his parents due to his father’s poor financial decisions, the most serious of which is the purchase of Ikey Lubin’s, a local, doomed-to-fail convenience store. But through this tension emerges an unbreakable family safehouse within the store. Anyone who takes refuge in Lucy’s family and the store feels welcomed and protected. This atmosphere itself is what Sarah seems to fall in love with, which inevitably leads to her heart’s struggle between Lucy and the more exciting Noonan.

Interestingly, also contradictory to Russo’s previous narratives, Lucy is not at all in discord with his life in his hometown. It is Sarah, who itches to travel, and Noonan, who leaves Thomaston as a teenager, never to return, who provide the juxtaposition of feeling safe in a familiar place and the pull of the outside world. Despite these and the aforementioned differences, one cannot help but feel that Russo is stuck within his same safe storyline. This book in particular seems to drag on with trivial side characters. And disappointing is the soft weakness of Lucy and his father, whose inner strength is never quite revealed, and perhaps does not exist at all. I found myself rooting for Sarah to leave behind her suffocating, predictable life in order to explore her own potential. But instead, as is standard with small town living, everything stays the same. And we are left feeling unsatisfied with the characters’ lack of development.