Okay, this one isn’t easy. Sigh.
Yes, it’s Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, which I read last week. I’m not going to say that I either do or don’t recommend it because, you know, everyone has different tastes, and I know some people who hate Flannery O’Connor, although I really don’t understand them.
I’ll just speak for myself and my own experience of the book. I was disappointed. I completely understand what Russo was trying to do, and in a sense he succeeded, but that success – in working out his theme – is diluted by storytelling that is too often an overstuffed, tough slog.
It is obligatory to state in every Russo review that Russo is the chronicler of small town America in decline, of the little guy who is trying to maintain his dignity in the midst of broader forces that would seek to pass him by or worse. He is also the chronicler of worrisome and fractured relationships between fathers and sons.
All of this is in Bridge of Sighs, which is set in the town of Thomaston. The economic engine of this town was a tannery – an irony since, ultimately, many (including one of the main characters) come to suspect that the institution that gave them a livelihood also contributed to the townspeople’s suffering because of the toxins dumped in the waters.
The central characters are Lou, nicknamed Lucy since childhood because of a teacher’s rapid pronunciation of his first name and middle initial of “C,” his close friend Bobby Marconi, and Lou’s wife, Sarah.
The story traces, in various segments, timelines, and from various points of view, the lives of these three from their childhood in late 40’s and 50’s on. Their story is the story of the town, and, more broadly of the American dream, and even more broadly still, the dynamic between “fate” and free will in the trajectory of human life, and the melancholy and second-guessing that overlays it all.
There is a lot going on in this book. And that I don’t necessarily mind, because given a choice between the large, busy, teeming bird’s-eye view of life type novel and the painfully careful intimate look at one person’s quest to make the perfect cup of tea, I’ll take the former. I am fascinated and impressed by intertwining and complicated plots because that is how life is.
But I have to say, sadly, that I just don’t think this one works. Russo is examining and explaining how all of these people tick, which leads to explaining how their parents and several of their friends tick, and how the town ticks in general, and there is just a bit too much. The whole thing could have been tightened up, it seems to me, without sacrificing any of the richness. On the other hand, there are some imporant plot threads that seem to suffer the opposite problem. The following will only make sense if you’ve read it – both Bobby and Sarah’s decisions about their lives are not worked out well enough, it seems to me.
In terms of the writing, Russo remains deeply sympathetic and knowing, artfully conveying to us the way these very real people think and the details of the world they live in. There is the intriguing matter of the unreliable narrator which I suspected, but became clear about 2/3 way through the book, and which made me perk up. There was, though, precious little humor in the book. However, one aspect of the writing bothered me, and I think it bothered me because I’m seeing so much of it these days. A sort of extreme reaction to the Carver school of spareness in which the inner lives of the characters are laid out for us in extensive interiority. I noted it in Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, I saw it again in The Great Man, and here it was yet again, and I think, honestly, that this is the element that bogged the book down – just lots and lots of thinking by the characters and explanations of the dynamics of what is and has gone on during these quite lengthy and frequent inner discourses. Not interior monologues, but more in the line of a character’s walk from the diner to the barber shop takes one block of geographic space but three pages in the novel as he reflects on the resonance and meaning of what has just happened in the diner. This is all, incidentally, giving me quite a lot to think about on my way from the living room to my study and back. And forth. And back.
I read that Russo had originally envisioned what he was working on as a trilogy, but either his editor or agent convinced him to weave it all into one book. Once I read that, something snapped into place in my head, and I absolutely could see this as a rather elegant trilogy, and I was sorry he didn’t stick to his original sense of it.
Sigh.
(Menand’s review in the New Yorker comes fairly close to my experience of the novel, without the implicit sneering at non-urban life.)