Alaska Employment Law

Richard Russo has written some wonderful books.  Actually, all of his books have merit, and some are really outstanding:  his last, Empire Falls, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  His latest is Bridge of Sighs, a big 527-page novel in which Russo once again creates lives in a small town off in the middle of nowhere (this time it’s upstate Thomaston, New York), faded and dying economically because the local tannery is failing and poisoning local waterways. 

In Bridge of Sighs, the Lynch family tries to make a go of a small convenience store - what around the sleepier cities and towns of New England used to be called a spa (you know, the old fashioned kind, with a Narragansett Beer sign out front and wooden floors).  Russo examines how hard it is to escape our destinies, to be anyone but the people we are.

Louis Charles Lynch, our protagonist and the owner of that little store, is known as “Lucy” - when he was in grade school, the teacher, during roll call, referred to him as Lou C. Lynch, to the vast amusement of his classmates, and the name stuck.  Notionally, Bridge of Sighs is the book Lucy is covertly writing about the history of his family, the Berg family (Sarah Berg is his wife) and the Marconi family (Bobby Marconi is never quite his friend, but his influence on both Lucy and Sarah is profound; Bobby ends up in Italy, an accomplished artist).  Sarah’s and Bobby’s parents are compelling, if not necessarily likeable, figures themselves.  This is a strong story with vivid characters, and I recommend it with just one small caveat - near the end there is a plot twist that is not quite credible, leading to a sentimental resolution of some of the looser ends in the book.  But hey, in truth by then I was totally hooked and didn’t care.

The Bridge of Sighs in Venice links the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s Square to the adjacent prison.  Convicts crossing the bridge recognize it as a passage in which all hope is lost.  The people in Russo’s novel deny the loss of hope; the novel reveals how well, or how poorly, they succeed.