Bridge of sighs

In his latest novel, Richard Russo returns to familiar Northeastern territory. SOMEONE - it's been attributed to everyone from Dostoyevsky to John Gardner - once said there are only two possible stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. To these Richard Russo has added a third: schlub stays put. In a time known in trendier circles for literary exile, Russo is the unofficial poet laureate of uneasy stasis, of fixing yourself to the place where you were born. Out the window goes the dynamism of American self-invention; in comes something almost more mysterious: a reckoning with an apparently seamless life continuity. If I didn't invent this self, where exactly did it come from? And yet more queasily: This place that nurtured me - did it also stunt me, inhibit me, even, literally, poison me? These are not small questions, and nothing should be held against Russo for returning to them over the course of several novels. In "Bridge of Sighs," his first since he won the Pulitzer for "Empire Falls" in 2002, Russo returns to his favorite setup: A small-business owner in a boreal climate comes to grips with a way of life he cherishes but suspects may be dying generally and, in his own case, may have girdled him far too tightly. Russo's latest protagonist is Lou C. Lynch, a large, decent, self-consciously simple man whose quiet mindfulness and basic optimism are easily mistaken for dull-witted naïveté. Say his name quickly, and it makes a trompe l'oreille; Lou C., thanks to a primary school wiseguy, goes through life as "Lucy." Lucy is now 60 and is writing not a memoir, precisely, but a kind of patient exhumation of his past that doubles as a history of his native town. Lucy's father was a "route man," a driver delivering milk in glass bottles to the wealthier homes. Russo presumes heavily on the charms of this genial simpleton - the elder Mr. Lynch's dull-witted naïveté wouldn't be mistaken for quiet mindfulness - even while indicting him for his almost willful blindness and offsetting him in the character of his wife, Lucy's mother. She is her husband's acid-tongued foil, and thanks to her acumen the family is saved from ruin when the milk route fails, an early casualty to chain supermarkets. Russo is an easygoing, conversational stylist and among the least "meta" writers going. Nonetheless, one begins to pick up a self-reflective echo from beneath a densely eventful narrative: a writer in late midcareer returns again to the motifs that made him prominent, while suspecting they may also have become decisively inhibiting. "Empire Falls" takes place in a small town in Maine; "Bridge of Sighs" is set in small-town New York. In the previous novel, the narrator owns a restaurant; in the new one, it's three convenience stores. In both, the Northeast is seen as a decaying behemoth whose old industrial infrastructure has outlived its power to convey prosperity. (The mill of "Empire Falls" is here a tannery, coping with its badly contaminated riverbed.) Lucy is not the only one who fears his existence has, in its prideful modesty, become predictable. To expand his horizon, and to throw a shadow over his protagonist's, Russo has added a companion narrative to run alongside Lucy's. Told in the third person, it recounts the story of Lucy's childhood friend, a semi-tough named Bobby Marconi. We know early on that just as Lucy stays the affable native son, Marconi will grow up, discard the name of his loathsome father and become a world-renowned painter. We first encounter Marconi as a prepubescent brawler living next door to the Lynches. Fast-forward to the present tense, and the 60-year-old Noonan (he has taken his mother's maiden name) is now a sect-of-one egomaniac living the high life as an expatriate artist in Venice. Connect Marconi up to Noonan, the boy to the man, and you have completed a magnificent suture job. Fail, and you have that latter-day La-La Land Frankenstein known as Good Will Hunting on your hands. Here I cannot deliver good news about "Bridge of Sighs." Lucy's narrative is as soft and lovely as the lapping of the tides; it pulls you on with all the surreptitious cunning of an undertow. Marconi/Noonan, meanwhile, is a misdemeanor committed against basic Aristotelian credence. "When Bobby fled Thomaston," Lucy writes, "he'd put neither pencil to paper nor brush to canvas." His journey to world fame (Ivy League professors write him knee-crooking letters, begging him to join their faculty) is accomplished not through apprenticeship, patience, sweat equity or cunning. No, instead, Bobby Noonan ... dreams. "Sometimes a single powerful dream would result in half a dozen canvases, a sequence of seemingly unconnected works, though he himself always recognized an emotional linkage, despite being powerless to articulate it." "Bridge of Sighs" is not a thinly populated book. B plots proliferate, characters appear and recede; but none of its genuinely tensile strength lies in its supposed breadth. A novel of far greater focus and intensity lies embedded in an enormous amount of narrative yadda. In an episode I am shocked reviewers have not made more of, the (very) young schoolboy Lucy is trapped by bullies in a trunk by an abandoned railway trestle, which his tormentors then pretend to saw in half. Lucy is terrified to the point of passing out. When he awakes much later, the persecutors long gone, he overhears an assignation turning nasty. A persistent ambiguity in the novel is whether the woman being wanton is his own mother, and whether the man who first beats her, then has intercourse with her, is his uncle. Unlikely - the woman opens the truck and sees Lucy, and (stupefied presumably by sex, drink, abuse) comments dully on his presence to her lover. But this Russo has exactly right: the treachery and latent violence of (some? much? all?) adult sexuality has forced itself onto a small boy's consciousness, overwhelming its capacity to understand. Is this true of all adults, this state of being in which one seeks comfort by imposing desolation upon another? Out of this episode, out of the repetitions and accretions of Lucy's past that build upon its awful legacy, a larger story emerges organically: of a town riven by class and racial hatred, a river overwhelmed by effluvia, a place struggling against the supposed freedoms conferred by the automobile and the mall. Why, upon such a promising beginning, did Russo feel compelled to wildly over-festoon his book? He had me at schlub stays put. Russo is the poet laureate of uneasy stasis, affixing yourself to the place where you were born. Stephen Metcalf is the critic at large for Slate and a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Berman Court 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. He and his wife are childless and likely, alas, to so remain. Earlier in my marriage it appeared as if we'd be blessed with a daughter, but a car accident when my wife was in her fourth month caused her to miscarry. That was a long time ago, but Sarah still thinks about the child and so do I. Perhaps what's most remarkable about my life is that I've lived all of it in the same small town in upstate New York, a thing unheard of in this day and age. My wife's parents moved here when she was a little girl, so she has few memories before Thomaston, and her situation isn't much different from my own. 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. I remind such people that until fairly recently the vast majority of humans have been circumscribed in precisely this manner and that lives can also be constrained by a great many other things: want, illness, ignorance, loneliness and lack of faith, to name just a few. But it's probably true my wife would have traveled more if she'd married someone else, and my unwillingness to become the vagabond is just one of the ways I've been, as I said, an unexciting if loyal and unwavering companion. She's heard all of my arguments, philosophical and other, for staying put; in her mind they all amount to little more than my natural inclination, inertia rationalized. She may be right. That said, I don't think Sarah has been unhappy in our marriage. She loves me and our son and, I think, our life. She assured me of this not long ago when it appeared she might lose her own and, sick with worry, I asked if she'd regretted the good simple life we've made together. Though our pace, never breakneck, has slowed recently, I like to think that the real reason we've not seen more of the world is that Thomaston itself has always been both luxuriant and demanding. In addition to the corner store we inherited from my parents, we now own and operate two other convenience stores. My son wryly refers to these as "the Lynch Empire," and while the demands of running them are not overwhelming, they are relentless and time-consuming. Each is like a pet that refuses to be housebroken and resents being left alone. In addition to these demands on my time, I also serve on a great many committees, so many, in fact, that late in life I've acquired a nickname, Mr. Mayor--a tribute to my civic-mindedness that contains, I'm well aware, an element of gentle derision. Sarah believes that 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. She worries that I often return home late in the evening and then not in the best of humors, a natural result of the fact that the civic pie we divide grows smaller each year, even as our community's needs continue dutifully to grow. Every year the arguments over how we spend our diminished and diminishing assets become less civil, less respectful, and my wife believes it's high time for younger men to shoulder their fair share of the responsibility, not to mention the attendant abuse. In principle I heartily agree, though in practice I no sooner resign from one committee than I'm persuaded to join another. And Sarah's no one to talk, serving as she has, until her recent illness, on far too many boards and development committees. Be all that as it may, the well-established rhythms of our adult lives will soon be interrupted most violently, for despite my inclination to stay put, we are soon to travel, my wife and I. I have but one month to prepare for this momentous change and mentally adjust to the loss of my precious routines--my rounds, I call them--that take me into every part of town on an almost daily basis. Too little time, I maintain, for a man so set in his ways, but I have agreed to all of it. I've had my passport photo taken, filled out my application at the post office and mailed all the necessary documents to the State Department, all under the watchful eye of my wife and son, who seem to believe that my lifelong aversion to travel might actually cause me to sabotage our plans. Owen in particular sustains this unkind view of his father, as if I'd deny his mother anything, after all she's been through. "Watch him, Ma," he advises, narrowing his eyes at me in what I hope is mock suspicion. "You know how he is." Italy. We will go to Italy. Rome, then Florence, and finally Venice. No sooner did I agree than we were marooned in a sea of guidebooks that my wife now studies like a madwoman. "Aqua alta," she said last night after she'd finally turned off the light, her voice near and intimate in the dark. She found my hand and gave it a squeeze under the covers. "In Venice there's something called aqua alta . High water." "How high?" I said. "The calles flood." "What's a calle ?" "If you'd do some reading, you'd know that streets in Italy are called calles ." "How many of us need to know that?" I asked her. "You're going to be there, right? I'm not going alone, am I?" "When the aqua alta is bad, all of St. Mark's is underwater." "The whole church?" I said. "How tall is it?" She sighed loudly. "St. Mark's isn't a church. It's a plaza. The plaza of San Marco. Do you need me to explain what a plaza is?" Actually, I'd known that calles were streets and hadn't really needed an explanation of aqua alta either. But my militant ignorance on the subject of all things Italian has quickly become a game between us, one we both enjoy. "We may need boots," my wife ventured. "We have boots." "Rubber boots. Aqua alta boots. They sound a siren." "If you don't have the right boots, they sound a siren?" She gave me a swift kick under the covers. "To warn you. That the high water's coming. So you'll wear your boots." "Who lives like this?" "Venetians." "Maybe I'll just sit in the car and wait for the water to recede." Another kick. "No cars." "Right. No cars." "Lou?" "No cars," I repeated. "Got it. Calles where the streets should be. No cars in the calles , though, not one." "We haven't heard back from Bobby." Our old friend. Our third musketeer from senior year of high school. Long, long gone from us. She didn't have to tell me we hadn't heard back. "Maybe he's moved. Maybe he doesn't live in Venice anymore." "Maybe he'd rather not see us." "Why? Why would he not want to see us?" I could feel my wife shrug in the dark, and feel our sense of play running aground. "How's your story coming?" "Good," I told her. "I've been born already. A chronological approach is best, don't you think?" "I thought you were writing a history of Thomaston," she said. "Thomaston's in it, but so am I." "How about me?" she said, taking my hand again. "Not yet. I'm still just a baby. You're still downstate. Out of sight, out of mind." "You could lie. You could say I lived next door. That way we'd always be together." Playful again, now. "I'll think about it," I said. "But the people who actually lived next door are the problem. I'd have to evict them." "I wouldn't want you to do that." "It is tempting to lie, though," I admitted. "About what?" She yawned, and I knew she'd be asleep and snoring peacefully in another minute or two. "Everything." "Lou?" "What." "Promise me you won't let it become an obsession." It's true. I'm prone to obsession. "It won't be," I promised her. But I'm not the only reason my wife is on guard against obsession. Her father, who taught English at the high school, spent his summers writing a novel that by the end had swollen to more than a thousand single-spaced pages and still with no end in sight. I myself am drawn to shorter narratives. Of late, obituaries. It troubles my wife that I read them with my morning coffee, going directly to that section of the newspaper, but turning sixty does that, does it not? Death isn't an obsession, just a reality. Last month I read of the death--in yet another car accident--of a man whose life had been intertwined with mine since we were boys. I slipped it into the envelope that contained my wife's letter, the one that announced our forthcoming travels, to our old friend Bobby, who will remember him well. Obituaries, I believe, are really less about death than the odd shapes life takes, the patterns that death allows us to see. At sixty, these patterns are important. "I'm thinking fifty pages should do it. A hundred, tops. And I've already got a title: The Dullest Story Ever Told ." When she had no response to this, I glanced over and saw that her breathing had become regular, that her eyes were closed, lids fluttering. It's possible, of course, that Bobby might prefer not to see us, his oldest friends. Not everyone, Sarah reminds me, values the past as I do. Dwells on it, she no doubt means. Loves it. Is troubled by it. Alludes to it in conversation without appropriate transition. Had I finished my university degree, as my mother desperately wanted me to, it would have been in history, and that might have afforded me ample justification for this inclination to gaze backward. But Bobby--having fled our town, state and nation at eighteen--may have little desire to stroll down memory lane. After living all over Europe, he might well have all but forgotten those he fled. I can joke about mine being "the dullest story ever told," but to a man like Bobby it probably isn't so very far from the truth. I could go back over my correspondence with him, though I think I know what I'd find in it--polite acknowledgment of whatever I've sent him, news that someone we'd both known as boys has married, or divorced, or been arrested, or diagnosed, or died. But little beyond acknowledgment. His responses to my newsy letters will contain no requests for further information, no Do you ever hear from so-and-so anymore? Still, I'm confident Bobby would be happy to see us, that my wife and I haven't become inconsequential to him. Why not admit it? Of late, he has been much on my mind. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Bridge of Sighs: A Novel by Richard Russo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.