Understanding Richard Russo

Chapter 7: Bridge of Sighs

chapter 7 Bridge of Sighs “It generally takes me four or five years to write a novel; this one took longer ,” explained Richard Russo in a 2007 interview, shortly after his sixth and longest novel to date, Bridge of Sighs, was released. “I spent six years, every day, with Lucy and Sarah and Noonan and the other characters in Bridge. Love is not too strong a word for the relationships that developed.”1 The love that flourished between the author and his characters spills over into the plot, as the primary tension of the novel takes the form of a love triangle, of sorts, that emerges among the three main characters in high school and lasts throughout their adult lives. As is perhaps to be expected from “the bard of Main Street U.S.A.,”2 the story is set against a backdrop of a decaying Rust Belt town defined by its defunct tannery and the trail of cancer diagnoses left in its wake. One of the three main characters escapes his small-town life and his abusive father, but the other two spend the rest of their lives in their broken-down town, building a life together that is not defined by its circumscription but rather proves to be both rich and satisfying, if occasionally bittersweet. In fact the novel as a whole, as one reviewer put it, can be read as “a love letter to the lost art of staying put.”3 Bridge of Sighs tells the story of sixty-year-old Lou C. Lynch (who gets saddled with the unfortunate and persistent nickname “Lucy” in kindergarten ) over the course of more than fifty years of his life. About half of the chapters are told from his first-person perspective, as he tries to write a memoir that recounts his childhood and also serves as a history of his hometown of Thomaston, New York. The other chapters are told in omniscient third person and are divided between Sarah, Lucy’s childhood sweetheart and wife of forty years, and Robert Noonan, a famous painter living in Venice, Italy, who when he was a boy lived in Thomaston, went by the name Bobby 82 Understanding richard rUsso Marconi, and was Lucy and Sarah’s best friend, their “third musketeer from senior year of high school” (6). Lucy and Bobby first come to know each other as children; from the beginning Lucy’s infatuation—even obsession —with Bobby colors much of his childhood and adolescence. Sarah also becomes infatuated with Bobby (even though she is Lucy’s girlfriend), and he falls in love with her as well. But circumstances intervene; when Bobby is eighteen, he brutally beats his father, with whom he has had a long and troubled relationship, and a warrant is issued for his arrest. Bobby changes his name to Robert Noonan and flees to Canada, never to return to Thomaston , and his love for Sarah (and hers for him) remains forever unspoken. Lucy and Sarah marry, raise a family in Thomaston, and inherit the convenience store once owned by Lucy’s parents. As the years pass, Lucy remains preoccupied with Bobby and their lost friendship; as the novel opens, Lucy and Sarah are planning a trip to Italy during which they hope to reunite with Bobby for the first time in more than four decades. Much of the novel is told in flashback, through Lucy’s supposed memoir, and it focuses on the childhood and adolescence of these three friends, their families, and their experiences up until their senior year of high school, when a series of decisions made in an instant set the course for the rest of their lives. On the surface Russo’s own life seems to resemble more closely that of Bobby Marconi than Lucy Lynch’s; Bobby leaves Thomaston after high school graduation, changes his name, and finds his way to a new life as a painter in Venice. Russo left the tannery town of Gloversville at the age of eighteen and, except for a few summers while he was still in college, seldom returned. In fact, however, he has claimed to identify just as closely with Lucy as with Bobby; Russo explained, “I am the boy who left and I am the boy who stayed. And the dichotomy of that has made me think even more and more pointedly about the place.”4 As Lucy confesses in his memoir, “I can’t help thinking that somehow Bobby actually managed to do what...