The opening of “Bridge of Sighs” does not comprise the liveliest of hooks: “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 a doting father to Owen, our son, who is now himself a grown married man.”
The unassuming tone invites the reader into the conversation. Author Richard Russo’s talent then takes over, fully supports these unassuming opening lines with a past and a future that takes the full breadth of this novel to reveal.
Louis “Lucy” Lynch has happily spent his entire life in a small town in upstate New York. He describes his home, Thomaston, as “a place you’ve never heard of, unless you’re a history buff, an art lover or a cancer researcher. The town was named for Sir Thomas Whitcombe, of French and Indian War fame. Our other claim to fame, Robert Noonan, the painter, grew up in Thomaston, though he left when he was barely eighteen and has lived his adult life abroad.”
Lucy is about to be dragged from his comfort zone. His wife, Sarah, has determined the couple will visit Italy. First Rome, then Florence and finally Venice, where they hope to meet up with a close friend from high school.
In Venice, Robert Noonan finds himself removed from Thomaston by far more than the Atlantic. He’s preparing for his first New York show in 30 years, and staring his mortality in the eye. He’s been quite productive and, of late, quite disturbed: “It was the
bouts of uncontrollable grief, even more than the occasional night terrors, that scared him. That mysterious sorrow, its source unfathomable. He was simply grieving. But for what, he couldn’t say.”
The long-ago intersection of these two lives and its reverberations over time form the nucleus of “Bridge of Sighs.” But orbiting around this tight center are characters that are anything but secondary: Lucy’s parents, Big Lou and Tessa, and his wife, Sarah. As is one more major player, the community of Thomaston. In its prime, the town had been supported by a tannery, which colored the adjacent river with its rainbow of dyes. The tannery is now closed, its legacy the chemical pollutants left behind.
The seemingly effortless telling of “Bridge of Sighs” masks the complexity of its construction, which blends the past and present with first-person and omniscient narrators.
Russo said he found keeping the disparate narrative strands under control a challenge. In a recent phone interview he said, “In early drafts, I had all of Lucy’s story in one place. … And then I had him writing his memoir to explain his early life – that’s about 250 pages or more in manuscript. When I finished that, I introduced Noonan in Venice … and then I had him tell his backstory.” After getting through most of Sarah’s sections, he sent about 600 pages to his agent and said that he thought he was working on three novels.
Nat Sobel, his agent, disagreed. He told Russo to start the time present and time past in a single narrative. Russo said, “I took about an hour to explain to him why that wouldn’t happen: It would be too confusing, things wouldn’t happen in the right order. After an hour, I realized that’s how it had to happen.” It was in ripping out the seams and reassembling the pieces that led him to see how the story needed to end.
“Her deepest contempt”
Russo’s previous novels are not even covertly political. That’s not the case in “Bridge of Sighs.” Lucy describes his mother’s reaction to a bumper sticker: “She despises our president as a dishonest fool whose lies and stupidity have cost over two thousand American lives, but her deepest contempt is reserved for those who voted for him – her son, she suspects, among them, though I’ve never told her who I voted for.”
Russo said he had been annoyed by people who “go from what they do know to what they don’t,” people who use fame in one arena as a bully political pulpit. “I’ve always not wanted to do that, particularly after winning the Pulitzer. I only know a few things, and those are in the books.”
But, he said, “this administration has made me more political. The Bush administration has made the liberal argument far more eloquently than I ever could. This book is about America, my parents’ America, their dreams. When Lou says to Lucy, ‘You ain’t got to have everything in life,’ that was the voice of that generation. You don’t have to have everything. This current administration has done such incredible damage to people who thought like that.
“You can’t blame it all on any president and any administration, but the astonishing greed has just driven some of this book. And some of my own love for this country is just under assault. Despite the fact that I didn’t set out to write a political novel, this (work) has forced me to remember the America I loved, (that) my father and grandfather risked their lives to defend, and we see it leaking away. … If I’m tragically disappointed over the direction the country has taken, I’m even more disappointed by my fellow Americans who have bought into it. You can say or believe the first election was stolen, but we got what we paid for.”
Russo’s common themes include father/son relationships and life in small towns that have seen better days. As he’s matured, women have taken a more central role in his work.
In “Bridge of Sighs,” Russo’s central women are fully realized. Russo said his earlier works were largely about male misbehavior, a world he knew very well and in which he didn’t have to deal with the question of “what if you try inhabiting a woman character and don’t get it right?” But, he said, the most important people in his life are women: his wife, his two daughters and his mother, who died last summer.
“It seemed cowardly not to give it a go,” he said. “If people wanted to say I couldn’t write women, then so be it,” but the potential opinion of others wasn’t going to prevent him from trying.
Russo’s characters are so fully formed that it seems they must share at least part of a psyche with their creator. Russo said the closest he has been to a character was Miles Roby in “Empire Falls,” but said he feels himself equidistant from this novel’s central men, the diametrically opposed Lucy Lynch and Robert Noonan.
“Lucy, I love his simplicity, his decency, his optimism – though I can’t share it. Noonan, I love his cynicism, his mental toughness. Psychologically, I’m closer to Noonan. This is a story about a boy who leaves and a boy who stays. I’m closer to the boy who leaves.”
“Bridge of Sighs” took six years to write, a long wait for Russo’s readers. “You learn something about novel-writing in every book you write – unfortunately, it’s not what you need to know to write the next one. You get smarter, and you learn some tricks, and those tricks are helpful in small ways. But each book presents a new challenge; each book seems to be deeply mysterious.
“My experience, which should help, often doesn’t. So I just flounder along,” he said. “I wasn’t waiting. I was working – stupidly, but with great faith – as hard on this book as on the last one.”
Robin Vidimos writes book reviews for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
fiction
Bridge of Sighs,
by Richard Russo, $26.95
