A Long Way From Venice

A Long Way From Venice Recommended Read: Richard Russo follows up Empire Falls with another meditation on small-town America

Bridge of Sighs
Richard Russo
Chatto & Windus, 6.25 pounds

The united states — especially on its eastern coast — has a richness of writers writing, each in his or her own way, the Great American Novel. Richard Russo has already scoped out his terrain: the changes that come to small-town New England seen through the lives of men and women affiliated to small businesses. In Empire Falls, the business was a diner. In Bridge of Sighs, it is a small chain of convenience stores.

Louis C. Lynch has lived all his life in Thomaston, New York. Change and hardship came to his family life, first when his mother used inherited savings to move to a more affluent neighbourhood and then when changes in retail made his father’s milk delivery route obsolete. A small grocery store threatened to go bankrupt with the advent of big, discount supermarkets, but his mother’s cunning in reading the consumer’s mind rescued the business.

Story continues below this ad

Now, at the age of 60, as Louis writes his memoir, it is a circumscribed meditation on a circumscribed life. The limitedness of his circumstances and aspirations is, of course, an obvious warning that everything is not as tranquil as it seems — and it could be argued that Russo’s way of meeting this expectation of a surprise does not live up to the promise.

But if a circumscribed life is limited, so can be a peripatetic one. A parallel narrative is devoted to Bobby Marconi, Louis’s childhood friend who escapes the bleakness of his inherited geography by settling eventually in Venice. He takes the name Noonan, and becomes a celebrated painter, with critics who had once trashed him grovelling to be now associated with him. Noonan has New York’s artiest snobs travelling to Venice to see his latest work. He has a growing brood of ex-wives and lovers remaining committed to saving him from his dark, terrible dreams. And he has Louis and his wife Sarah writing to seek a meeting on a planned trip abroad. Yet, as Noonan is forced to confront the terrors that haunt him, his life too does not appear that much more expansive than Louis’s.

Together, however, the two lives illuminate a moment in American history. Together, they show how spaces are left blank as Americans stay mindful of their roots and as they reach out to the world and the opportunities of self-enhancement offered by cosmopolitanism. And each of the two stories, in its own way, adds to the wealth of novels being written in the US by an amazing generation that includes John Updike, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Richard Ford and Don DeLillo.