Hurrah! I have finally made it through all 527 pages of Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo’s new book, Bridge of Sighs. Someone, hand me a cigar.
Louis C Lynch (otherwise known as Lucy) is 60 years old and about to embark on an Italian trip with his devoted wife Sarah, but first he wants to tell his life story. As he considers himself not very exciting it could be quite a dull tale, even he admits that. And in some ways, he’s right.
Lucy has spent just about every minute of his life in the small upstate New York town of Thomaston, where when he was a kid his dad drove the milk truck and most people worked at the tannery, which dumped colourful dyes into the local river.
Picking through his past with a fine-tooth comb, Lucy revisits the choices he made, or didn’t make. We get a bird’s- eye view of his parents’ marriage, of his own union with childhood sweetheart Sarah, and of his hankering for friendship with his one-time neighbour Bobby, now a famous artist.
In fact, we get a bird’s-eye view of just about everyone in the entire town, and also of people who only passed through once, on a bus, and didn’t stop. It shouldn’t really be compelling reading, but it is quietly addictive. The detail of the world into which Richard Russo plunges the reader is so well defined you can almost smell it.
Lucy is fixated on the past and before too long, you are right there with him, sympathising with his sharp-tongued mother, commiserating with his irrepressible father, hanging out by the meat counter at Ikey Lubin’s, the corner store where life begins and ends for the Lynch clan. The point of it all being, I guess, that by page 527 Lucy has worked out why he is the way he is and so have we. We’ve also worked out why Bobby, the one who got away, turned out differently.
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