When a book I chose to read on my own is later selected by one of my clubs, I'm pleased to be a step ahead in my reading queue. But when a book club choice is a winner like Richard Russo's "Bridge Of Sighs" (2007), it's even better - I have a legitimate excuse to re-read, an impulse I don't often indulge.
Russo sets the bulk of the action here in hardscrabble upstate New York, a locale recognizable to anyone who has read his other work. The milieu, his unerring ear for the way people speak to each other, and a keen sense of how folks often muddle through life give Russo's novels the familiar feeling of old shoes. Though the novel is nominally about Louis and Sarah Lynch - married forty years and living in their high school hometown - and a planned visit to Venice to re-connect with artist Bobby Noonan, a high school friend who has lived abroad since graduation - the book takes that simple premise and converts it into a roomy and complex multi-generational saga. Such are the storytelling gifts of Richard Russo - familiar but fresh; simple but rich.
As always, Russo's affection for his characters helps him slowly reveal the shadow side of seemingly unassailable traits. For example, here he shows how Louis' solidity and loyalty sometimes curdle into dullness and his unfailing optimism can make it difficult to detect nuance. Soon after finishing "Bridge Of Sighs" this second time I recalled someone recently telling me he reads only non-fiction because he likes to "learn something when I read". I'm working on the way to bring up Russo's work in the next conversation I have with that person.
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- Pat Barton
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I seized on the phrase "legitimate excuse to re-read" and began to consider the many things I have re-read in my retired life and why. I have re-read entire books because they demanded it; as I've told you before, my novels fight for my attention. Currently I am reading Elizabeth Strout's "My Name Is Lucy Barton" 2016. I'm doing something new and quite compulsive with this one. I read each chapter and then immediately re-read it. This novel is so well-written that I have no choice. I must experience each chapter again and answer the question, "Why was that so good?"
ReplyDeleteOnly once in my life have I gotten into such a re-reading bind that I took many weeks to get to the end of a novel. Every time that I picked the book up, I'd savor sentences, paragraphs and previous chapters with such intensity that I never wanted to swallow. That was Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible" 2005. Should I thank you for that or blame you for that? I think you recommended that one to me!