Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (2007, Hardcover)

Richard Russo has made a name for himself as one of the finest American novelists of all time. It was for "Empire Falls" that he won the Pulitzer Prize, though "Bridge of Sighs" is equally crafted and even more brilliant. Russo writes about what he knows, a small town in central New York and the deeply intricate characters such a town will produce. In "Bridge of Sighs" Russo takes us over a span of more than fifty years; he reminds us of emotions we had as children but fail to replicate with words; he is able to put into words that which we feel but fail to express. It is in this way that Richard Russo relates to us so well: he is everyman and a writer so gifted that literature such as Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens and John Irving must make room among the immortal for this skilled craftsman. "Bridge of Sighs" is an extraordinarily satisfying read. Some reviewers have spoken of it's sadness-even devastating, but the truth is that the on-going message in the book that he really has said and displayed time and time again is that people don't change and things don't stay the same: they get better or worse. Every reviewer has agreed that this is a masterpiece. Russo has addressed some very real, very honest issues in this novel, not to suggest that he hasn't in the past, but his celebrity and his earned points from the Pulitzer almost seem to have allowed him the freedom to open our closets and shake around our skeletons a bit. The fact that our principle character suffers from PTSD and when he is triggered has what everyone calls "his spells" is quite timely, given the returning soldiers from Iraq, however, Russo likely wrote of the trauma that occurred only one year after the historic Nine-Eleven. He writes of the inevitable, even how history repeats itself- generation after generation but again, this is introduced very early in the book so suggesting that anything at all is a surprise only confirms what Russo is saying: That we should not take things for face value, that by opening our eyes we can see truth and that some people are capable of coping and some people require memory of good times by removing the bad memories and some simply survive by accepting; running from our issues doesn't remove the issues and common sense isn't so common as we may believe. There are no new lessons here, certainly, but no one has ever said as well or as interestingly as Richard Russo has. Perhaps through this book, we will at last learn something of ourselves and our lov3ed ones. You'll want to read every word Russo has written and you can begin with "Bridge of Sighs", there is no chronology, but whether you start with this book or with his first, "Mohawk", you'll end up right where all of his readers are: anxiously awaiting the next volume to be published. You can satisfy a dry spell with the wonderful movie version of his book, "Nobody's Fool" (which featured Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy in her last film performance)and the HBO work of art: "Empire Falls" for which Mr. Russo wrote the screenplay. And you can re-read his books or his short stories, but soon enough, you will manage to purchase a signed first edition on eBay and write a review of both a single novel and an entire body of work, knowing that in fifty years time, this signed first edition book will be worth as much as the signed first edition I have of "Tom Sawyer."