Bridge of Sighs

“First, the facts,” declares Louis Lynch, a.k.a. Lucy, the protagonist-narrator of Russo’s latest novel. The civic-minded, 60-year-old Lucy has spent his entire life in provincial Thomaston, New York—“a place you’ve never heard of, unless you’re a history buff, an art lover, or a cancer researcher.” He runs “the Lynch Empire,” three convenience stores named Ikey Lubin’s. He reads the obituaries every morning and prides himself on being “an unexciting if loyal and unwavering companion” to his wife, Sarah—his teenage sweetheart, who chose a life of domestic comfort rather than try her luck as a painter—and a distant, albeit loving, father to his grown son Owen, who is as sedentary and resolute as he is.

Simply planning a trip to Italy to visit his childhood friend Bobby Marconi —a.k.a. Noonan, who left Thomaston and never looked back—is enough to upset the rhythms of Lucy’s ways. Rather than spiral headlong into a late-life crisis, Lucy subtly sabotages his wife’s travel plans and sits down to write his family history.

Russo’s novel begins as a way for Lucy to imagine an alternate version of his life, a narrative “more realistic than the truth,” but it ends up as a meditation on human destiny: “In youth, we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice…But at some point all of that changes…To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.” The second half of the novel attempts to subvert a plodded, or inevitable, plotline. The point of view splinters until eventually Lucy’s simplistic tale becomes more about the melodramatic twists and turns of the people in his life —Noonan, Sarah—than Lucy himself.

For the most part, Russo manages to draw impeccably round characters—excepting the black characters, who speak as if confined to a Fat Albert cartoon. And he runs them along a chain of events that forces them to see that the present is “more urgent than the past.”