Bridge of Sighs

I was responsible for choosing Bridge of Sighs by Robert Russo as our April/May 2010 book, and ergo responsible for blogging about our experience with it. What with the end of the school year and all else going on I am regrettably tardy in this post . . . and in the interest of full disclosure, some of the synopsis of this book was 'borrowed' from Ron Charles' review of the book in the Washington Post.

"Richard Russo was already the patron saint of small-town fiction . . . once again he places us in a finely drawn community that's unable to adjust to economic changes, and with insight and sensitivity he describes ordinary people struggling to get by. But more than ever before, Russo ties this novel to the oldest preoccupations of our national consciousness by focusing on the nature of optimism and the limits of self-invention.

Here is a story true to the pace and tenor of town life but rife with all the cares and crises of people everywhere. It takes place over many decades in Thomaston, N.Y., where the tannery slowly laid off and poisoned residents until most of them died or moved away. But not all-around nice guy "Lucy" Lynch, who grew up here, never left and is now nearing retirement. He acquired that embarrassingly feminine nickname in kindergarten when the teacher called for "Lou C. Lynch." All this and much more is explained in a history he's writing of the town and his life, a project inspired by an upcoming trip to Italy, where he hopes to see an old friend.

Bridge of Sighs crosses through many subjects and themes, but the story revolves around Lucy's relationship with his father, the man he adored and resembles in so many ways that it troubles him. Big Lou was a slightly goofy, sentimental man who grew up during the Depression but emerged convinced "that we were living a story whose ending couldn't be anything but happy." A milkman at the dawn of the supermarket era, Big Lou refuses to acknowledge the imminent demise of his career. Lucy's mother, on the other hand, is a sharp, realistic woman, who finds her husband's unbridled optimism exasperating. She makes a point of contradicting his cheery predictions, but it makes no difference to Big Lou.

Lucy spends much of the novel negotiating these opposing points of view, aware that he always took his father's side against his mother's deflating realism. Though decades have passed, Lucy remains torn between the two people who loved him, still trying to work out what kind of man he has become. This is not a particularly dramatic story -- a racially charged high-school beating provides the only real fireworks -- but Russo's sensitivity to the currents of friendship and family life, the conflicts, anxieties and irritations that mingle with affection and loyalty, make Bridge of Sighs a continual flow of little revelations.

The most interesting relationship in the novel is Lucy's unlikely friendship with Bobby Marconi, a tough kid who despises his abusive father as much as Lucy adores his own. He's confident and athletic, the mirror opposite of Lucy. Their friendship is badly one-sided, but Lucy is too infatuated to notice, and Bobby is just kind enough to resist telling this nerdy kid to get lost. Even after Bobby and some other ruffians stuff him in a trunk and traumatize him for the rest of his life, Lucy remains determined to believe that his friend wasn't involved.

Russo narrates significant sections of the novel in the third person, filling in details about Bobby's disturbing family life and "Lucy's terrible neediness." In addition, we get several chapters narrated by the adult Bobby, now 60, a famous artist living in Italy. The cumulative effect is a story of constantly evolving complexity and depth, a vast meditation on adolescence and the way it's remembered and misremembered to serve our needs." (end of borrowed synopsis)

As a group we collectively enjoyed Bridge of Sighs. I chose the book because I have loved Russo's writing in the past and this book did not disappoint, although I still think I like The Straight Man most of his novels. We all liked the book; no one hated it, but conversely no one loved it either. We liked the characters we were supposed to like - Lucy and Big Lou, Sarah and Bobby Marconi. We disliked the characters presented to us in darker shades, Lucy's mother Tessa, Bobby's abusive father, and Bobby grown into the unlovable Noonan. Some peripheral characters gave us a few laughs or emotional tugs, like Deborah (?) the somewhat forgettable, already world-weary female classmate of Lucy's who lives above their store for a time and plays on his kindness to get free cigarettes, and Uncle Declan, Big Lou's no-good brother who partially redeems himself by helping to recreate their small store in the face of the supermarket threat in town. Even Bobby's father ends up somewhat if not completely redeemed when he tries to forge a relationship with his young adult son.

One thing we have noticed in our 13+ years as a book group is that we seem to have less to talk about when we all like a book. When nothing inspires us to love or hate we all seem to agree and then be done. This leads me to wonder if more controversial choices should be made; I know I for one choose things for book group that I think will be agreeable, moderate sorts of read instead of the things I read for my own pleasure outside of the book group setting. But in the end it is the time we spend together that matters, not only the choice of books that we choose. We have read hundreds of books by my count, and on average we absolutely love about one per year. I think that is probably in keeping with the rest of our reading lives as well.