Six years after the best-selling, Pulitzer
Prize–winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo returns
with a novel that expands even further his widely heralded
achievement.
Louis Charles (“Lucy”) Lynch has spent
all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married
to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a
grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an
optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief
among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was
her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had
propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and
created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed
on to the next generation.
Lucy and Sarah are also
preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his
oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself far
from anything they’d known in childhood. In fact, the exact
nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy
hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his
hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with
that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the
destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too)
are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly
revealing.
Bridge of Sighs is classic Russo,
coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family,
yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose
motivations and experiences—often contrary, sometimes
not—prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through
these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a
world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating
contradictions.
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