Taking His Act On the Road
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Richard Russo has found a way to make the American dream sad again. In the Pulitzer Prizewinning “Empire Falls,” and in his more comic novels, his knowledge of small-town America has proved both pedestrian and fearless; the typecast characters who swarm through his pages remind us, we have to admit, of people we actually know. What some hold up as a nostalgic dream or a sentimental tragedy looks real enough in Mr. Russo’s vision. The decline of the small town, the trap of the small town: These are the tragedies Mr. Russo dignifies.
Mr. Russo’s new book, “The Bridge of Sighs” (Alfred A. Knopf, 528 pages, $26.95), compares life in a small town, Thomaston, with life in Venice, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The comparison is necessitated by a classic love triangle. Lou C. Lynch — known as Lucy — eventually married Sarah Berg, but 40 years later they both still pine for Robert Noonan, the Thomaston son who got away. Now a successful but disorganized painter living in Venice, Noonan inhabits a skeletal expat world that feels bloodless compared with the anguish that Mr. Russo injects into Thomaston.
In his descriptions of Venice, the author is on unfamiliar terrain. The ex-pats interact only with other Americans, and their precariousness as citizens of the world is only assumed. We don’t learn much about Noonan’s paintings — except that some are figural, and that all contain a “worm,” a telltale element of bitterness — although at the deepest levels, where Mr. Russo must be drawing on his own experience with the rhythms of inspiration and work, Noonan’s creative life convinces.
Yet as a point of comparison to Thomaston, Venice works for Russo. After a lifetime of sedentary upstate quietude, Lucy has agreed on a European vacation. Sarah, herself an amateur artist who gave up Cooper Union to marry, selects Italy for their destination. They will visit Noonan and be confronted by his success, or at least by his alien existence. Though Noonan has abandoned the structure of a traditional American life, he is nevertheless the specter that awaits this upper-middle-class couple, now that they are ready to embark on the first vacation of their retirement.
It is Lucy who narrates most of this story. In voice and in situation, he recalls Marilynne Robinson’s Reverend John Ames, whose mild tone somehow lit “Gilead” up like a sun. Mr. Russo ventures a similar effect, casting reticence and sincerity together. But where Ames’s reticence indicates his self-assurance and faith, Lucy speaks from a defensive position, happy to let wonder stand uninvestigated. “Even now, over fifty years later, I feel profoundly the miraculousness of these events, though explanation renders them mundane,” he writes, remembering a time his father rescued him after a gang of bullies had left him for dead.
There is much that Lucy declines to understand — for one thing, he is probably gay, we deduce. But of all Lucy’s unspoken evolutions, the most striking is his success. A shy young boy who instinctively prefers his blithe, good old-boy father to his sharp, skeptical mother, Lucy spent his childhood following the young Noonan around, like a puppy. His high school English teacher regards Lucy as all that is wrong with America, timid and callow. But he ends up stable, content, the unofficial mayor of Thomaston.
Mr. Russo sees his tidy study of the American dream as an occasion for comparing two lives, those of Lucy and Noonan. Of the two, Noonan has succeeded, but who has best understood his life? By the novel’s end, we’ve had a great deal of narration from both men, covering the same high-school ground. As a narrator, Lucy is revealed to be unreliable by dint of his gullibility — a fact Noonan confirms, noting that Lucy is good to lie to. Even as a teenager, Noonan had become a casual expert on Lucy’s shortcomings: he sees Lucy as needy, and complains that “his thinking was relentlessly conventional. He had not only been taught by nuns, he’d actually listened to them.”
Yet Noonan’s narration has a striking superficial quality. Though he sees deep into Lucy and several other characters, they do not matter much to him. He lives with his own work, in the present. When, at the novel’s end, he breaks down crying after getting a letter from Lucy’s wife, Sarah, we should be satisfied to feel that Thomaston still has some claim on him. But we do not believe it. Noonan’s real life lies with his art. He has truly gotten away; he has succeeded in being himself.
Meanwhile it is Lucy, the backward-looking homebody, who has told the story that matters. The bridge of sighs, connecting the Doge’s Palace to the dungeons of Venice and affording the convict a last glimpse of air and sea, serves as a clunky but apt symbol for Lucy’s life. He has knowingly shirked adventure; he has gone willingly into a dim but comfortable life, but he has certainly sighed along the way.
Perhaps he has ignored circumstances — his homosexuality, for one — that other men would grasp as being fundamental, but he has at least experienced the arc of his own story, while Noonan, preoccupied, has not. This interpretation may run counter to Mr. Russo’s intentions — he has Sarah and Noonan working, simultaneously, on paintings of the bridge of sighs, as if it belonged to them — but I think the author’s heart lies closest to Lucy, who is perhaps the only character sentimental enough to take the American dream seriously. In this study of that dream, it is the person who is saddest that wins.
blytal@nysun.com