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What's Love Got To Do With It? Everything

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By ROGER K. MILLER

Published: September 30, 2007

'Bridge of Sighs,' by Richard Russo (Knopf, $27)

If there is a unifying element in Russo's massive yet splendidly controlled seventh work of fiction, 'Bridge of Sighs,' it is contained in two words uttered a few dozen pages from the end by its chief character and narrator: 'Blame love.'

Not that everyone gets love, or gives it. Merely that everyone's fate is shaped by love, the warping of it or the lack or the withholding of it.

Russo is back on his native ground of upstate New York, scene of his first three novels, 'Mohawk,' 'The Risk Pool' and 'Nobody's Fool,' populated by lower-middle-class, blue-collar people struggling to hang on in economic disaster areas that offer almost no remaining handholds.

That pretty much describes the Thomaston, N.Y., of 'Bridge of Sighs,' where the chief industry, a tannery, folds after decades of pouring carcinogenic dyes into the local Cayoga Stream. What maintained the families' lives likely is also causing their deaths.

Most of the novel is told by Lou C. Lynch, stuck from childhood on with the nickname 'Lucy' because of the conjunction of first name and middle initial. In the months leading up to a planned trip to Venice, Lucy is setting down in a journal his 60 years of life in Thomaston. Other parts of the story are told by an unseen narrator.

Lucy in temperament is in many ways a copy of his patient, dreamy, slow-moving father. He marries his high school sweetheart, Sarah, a woman not unlike his tough-minded, earthbound realist mother.

'Even as a girl, she'd been determined to take responsibility for the hand she'd been dealt, despite not having cut the cards, and the dealer a known cheat.'

That, an example of Russo's frequent wit, tells us a good deal about Sarah - and a lot more (in few words) about the author's views on the ordering (and the orderer) of the universe. Talk about a tale told by an idiot.

Russo knows small-town politics, commerce and social order. He fills this novel, as his others, with vivid characters, and if they are not larger than life, like those by Dickens, whom Russo much admires, they are certainly full of life.

The fulcrum of the novel is Bobby Marconi, who has become a noted artist in Venice. All his life, Lucy has yearned for him, in a nonhomoerotic way. Bobby only tentatively returns his friendship.

Sarah, too, is caught in Bobby's orbit. He, through late-blooming gift, got the artistic career that she, through mere talent, was cut out for. It is not too much to say that she sacrifices her love for Bobby and her art on the altar of her loving devotion to Lucy.

Most of all, Russo knows, or at least is expert in plumbing, the mysteries of the human heart, which, as Lucy says, 'inclines this way and that, without permission, ever unruly, ever wayward.'

Blame love.

Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.

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