Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

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Sometimes, even with writers whom I like quite a lot, I will arrive at a point where I am convinced that I have gotten from them what I can. I had assumed that to be the case with Richard Russo when I read Empire Falls. After all, he is not a great writer, nor does he have a profound understanding of human nature or of social-political history. And so it was almost an accident that I picked up and began to read his latest novel, Bridge of Sighs. I am now convinced that this is his best novel so far in its ability to create deep, convincing characters, in its understanding of life, and in its social commentary.

Russo’s male characters almost always have a gruffly good-natured quality to them—men who know they have not measured up even to their own expectations, but who muddle along in their relationships and their lives trying to do better while never deceiving themselves into believing that they are more or better than they really are. Usually, they have problems with commitment to spouses or even to lovers, and suggest that the women in their lives would, most likely, be better off without them. Most of them seem to have a kind of Walter Matthau charm to them, likable partly because of their own constant and critical self-analysis. Louis C. Lynch, the lead character in this novel, is again a character in that mold, almost morbidly self-reflective, but in my estimation he rises above the others both in his understanding of the relationships in which he finds himself and in understanding himself.

Louis C., maliciously nicknamed Lucy by his childhood friends, is a slow-talking, deliberate and lonely boy. Like his father, Lou senior, Lucy is big, good-natured and so measured in his delivery that he seems to others to be dimwitted. Add to this that he sometimes has spells, periods of time when he more-or-less blanks out, neither speaking nor moving, and it is no wonder that the people in his small upstate New York town, Thomaston, think he is at the very least odd. His best, and for much of his young life, only friend, Noonan, is Lucy’s opposite in almost all ways. Feisty, brave and dashing, Noonan is chosen by Lucy, latched onto, but always chafes at the affection and attention Lucy beams at him, and is relieved when his abusive, authoritarian father insists that he terminate the friendship. That Lucy’s love for Noonan is unrequited seems only to intensify his obsession, and he manages at a few different periods of their young lives to bring Noonan back into the sphere of his life until finally Noonan escapes not only from Lucy, but from Thomaston and even from the U.S., ending up as a relatively famous painter in Venice.

The reader is introduced to the characters as adults. Lucy has remained his entire life in Thomaston, content and seeing no reason to leave, and is looking backwards over his life while writing a clumsy memoir. His wife, Sarah, also an artist, and far less content with their sequestered small-town lives, insists finally on a trip to Europe where the couple hopes to meet up with the long departed Noonan. As Lucy looks back, the reader is invited to look at the close and loving relationship Lou junior has with his optimistic and upbeat father and at his more troubled relationship with his much more astute and realistic mother, Teresa, or Tessa as she is called by Lou senior. Tessa and Sarah have much in common; both are wise and efficient, understanding the naïve optimism of their husbands and taking steps to avoid the pitfalls that the men’s naivete would otherwise land them in. From the first, Tessa understands that her son’s love and devotion to his friend Noonan is almost all one-sided, and she does what she can to protect him from his own blindness. Likewise, she understands the financial ineptness of her husband, and does what she can to keep the family from ruin.

Through these two strong female characters, Russo is able to make clear (as he does in his earlier works) his conviction that women have an emotional intelligence that most men lack. He also paints his women as stronger than the men, more able to deal with the necessities of life. While the men dream and founder, the women have families, make decisions, and persevere. But there is a price for their loyalty and realism:

They’d both loved their husbands more than anyone even suspected, and in return had been adored. But each of them had walked through and open door, then heard it slam shut behind them and the mechanism lock. While neither regretted her decision, knowing the door was locked was disconcerting just the same, as was the fact that their husbands, if they’d heard that same slam and click, seemed untroubled by it. If anything, knowing that there was no turning back was reassuring to them.

While it is obvious that Russo admires the women in his own novels (and no doubt in his own life), there is a kind of essentialism that I find troublesome. I think he tends to forgive his male characters (and himself) for their faults in relationships by suggesting that it simply cannot be helped—men, given who they (by nature) are, simply cannot cope as their better and stronger women can. It is women who must finally understand the children, and help the men try to understand themselves. And while he suggests that men are probably more trouble than they are worth, something rings false in his analysis.

A commentator for the New York Post remarks that this book is very much in the Russo pattern but “is a departure into deeper, almost philosophical realms.” Yes, and why say “almost philosophical,” as if only philosophers and not mere writers of fiction can do philosophy? Russo does wax philosophical in this novel, and he does try to deal with real problems of economic oppression and racism and sexism, even daring at a few points to write in the voice of black characters. While there is still something myopic and unsophisticated about his political commentary, this is a novel that tries to look back and sum up what has occurred in this country in the last century, tries to expose some of the rifts in the American dream. Certainly, the novel has an intellectual maturity I did not find in his earlier works while preserving the humor and light-handedness of those novels.

Let me leave you with a longish quote that I think evidences some of Russo’s philosophical maturation in this book:

Odd, how our view of human destiny changes over the course of a lifetime. In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn’t. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we’re curious to know what’s behind the next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we’ll have found not just our true, destination but also its meaning....

But at some point all of that changes. Doubt, born of disappointment and repetition, replaces curiosity. In our weariness we begin to sense the truth, that more doors have closed behind than remain ahead, and for the first time we’re tempted to swing the telescope around and peer at the world through the wrong end ... To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy ... And yet not all mystery is lost, nor all meaning.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

I have often said that there are too many great or very good books to spend much time talking about bad or not very good ones. But today I want to talk about a not especially good book that is currently enjoying its moment of fame. The title of the book is Empire Falls, and its moment of fame is due (I think primarily) to its appearance as an HBO miniseries with an impressive cast including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Aiden Quinn and others. The series and/or its actors have been nominated for a number of Golden Globe awards, and I can understand the appeal of both the book and the series quite apart from the impressive cast. I openly applaud many of the messages in the book. I’ll not say much here about the miniseries except to urge readers to try the book before the film series.

Richard Russo is a fine writer; he is funny and clever, and I think he may understand some of the glaring weaknesses of men as spouses, parents, friends about as well as any male author I can think of. His male lead characters in Straight Man, Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool are drawn in clearly sympathetic ways, and yet each of the men seems simply befuddled by his spouse or lover; each is apparently loving but unable really to communicate or even to open up lines of communication with his loved ones, and although in some ways socially or politically astute, each seems unable really to take themselves seriously or to do anything with their awareness. There are (as I recall) also very strong women characters in each of these books, and Russo is able to make it clear that he genuinely admires them—as spouses, as parents, as people who do take themselves seriously in the world, and his male characters always seem to hope (in vain?) to learn something from these exemplary women.

Miles Roby, the lead character in Empire Falls is just such a man, and I suppose that one of the things that almost immediately irritated me about the book was the similarity between Miles and all Russo’s other well-meaning but obtuse male leads. Miles is separated from his wife whom he seems not to understand at all; he is a caring and even diligent father to his teenage daughter, but generally it seems that it is she who must take care of him. His father, a much worse husband, communicator, parent, or serious-person-in-the-world than Miles, seems in most ways simply one of the male characters from an earlier Russo novel grown into the pessimistic and ineffectual old man he was destined all along to become.

Miles’ mother, beautiful, wise, and self-sacrificing seems also to be a reincarnation of one of Russo’s earlier female characters. Whatever his father lacks in seriousness and self-discipline, his mother makes up for by seeming to have no life of her own at all. She is a mother, a wife, a provider, and she dies young—all seemingly ingredients in what Russo sees as the good woman. She has one glorious vacation on Martha’s Vinyard, even a night or two of loving and being loved (with a man whom the reader supposes she simply met there), and for this she pays, and pays, and pays.

So, having said so little good about the novel up to now, why would I review it or recommend it? Well, for one thing it is a typical but important story to tell about how small towns (as well as big cities) often die at the mercy of the rich. A small factory town in Maine, Empire Falls flourishes for a generation or two due to the success of the shirt and textile factories that operate on the river. Almost everything in the town is owned by the same family who owns the factories, and when (through whim, or boredom, or less than expected financial returns) the last factory is closed down, it is the townspeople (and not the owners) who suffer. Many simply leave, forced to pull up stakes and find work somewhere else. Those who remain struggle simply to get by, their homes (just in case they own them) not worth much, but what else are they to do? And there is always the hope that the factory will come alive again.

Miles runs a little restaurant, owned, of course, by Mrs. Whiting, the widow of the last in the line of Whitings who have made their money by buying up whatever they saw and simply holding it as a hedge against the future. A literary type by nature and the hope of his mother who has sacrificed everything so that he could go to college and escape Empire Falls, Miles and his brother make a meager living running the restaurant. Miles left college and returned to Empire Falls due to his mother’s cancer, and although he knows how much she would hate it, inertia and some distorted sort of loyalty keep him there even after she dies. Miles, too dispassionate even to be bitter, simply suffers his existence, buoyed at least slightly by his bright and wonderful daughter (who lives now with his estranged wife).

While I would not call this book a political one, nevertheless it is distinctly blue-collar, and the sympathies of the author are obviously with the townspeople and not the wealthy owners. Indeed, we find eventually that the Whitings have simply been holding onto the land, the factory, the town, because they knew that some parts would eventually be attractive to outside money. And, indeed, the factory is finally purchased by some corporation that specializes in buying and selling companies that have some valuable inventory and can in one way or another either turn a profit or serve as tax-breaks. The hopes of the town are raised to a temporary ecstasy when the factory is purchased by outside money; the few who are employed show how they will work for little, and then for less, in order to help increase profits. But, alas, the comparatively small profits to be had have never been much of an issue with the owners, and when the time comes, the inventory, the equipment, is simply sold off, and the factory sold off because of the soon to be valuable river-front land. The employees are let go without so much as a thought. And this not out of malice or intent, but simply because of the necessary blindness of corporate greed.

There is more to the book than I have mentioned; I find Russo’s fascination with religion interesting. Miles, a Catholic by birth and then by a kind of devotion to his saintly dead mother, can neither embrace Catholicism nor completely abandon it. He paints the church for free while taking a skeptical role in arguments over theology with the new priest, and I am convinced it is Russo who is doing the struggling, the questioning, wanting really to believe what he is quite sure is not true. I like also at least one of the women characters in the book, one whom I would say has occurred in other incarnations in other of his novels. The woman, a few years older than Miles, has been his heart-throb since boyhood, although Miles seems unable to act on his infatuation in any way other than comparing her goodness to his wife’s deficiencies.

Most of all, Russo is a funny man, and he creates male characters that I like to laugh at, and whom I also encounter far too often in the mirror. Indeed, he seems to know quite a lot about these men, and even something about how they might rise up out of their passive existential despair and do something. Maybe in his next novel.

Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo

I want to talk to you this morning about a contemporary male author, Richard Russo and his novel Nobody’s Fool. Earlier this year I reviewed two novels by Russo, Straight Man and The Risk Pool. In that review I suggested that while Russo is a very good (and very funny) writer, and while he seems to understand at some fundamental level a lacking in most men—a lack that shows up especially in relationships and parenting—he makes the mistake of adopting a kind of essentialism. While men are more or less emotionally blind and inattentive to others, Russo seemed to say that this is simply a part of their nature, just as it is a part of the nature of women to genuinely attend to others and to be in tune with their emotional selves (as well as the emotional selves of others). The problem with that sort of essentialism is that it simply lets men off the hook; if they cannot help their lack of outward attention, then how can we expect more of them.

I still believe that Russo embraces a kind of essentialism, that he has an overly romantic and sentimental attitude towards women, but in reading Nobody’s Fool I became more and more convinced that Russo is actually trying to expose some of the very beliefs that I criticized him for holding. He certainly knows that men, even his favorite men characters, are lacking in what I often call emotional intelligence—that they not only substitute anger for an entire range of emotions that either they don’t feel or can’t express, but also that they seem to lack the ability to analyze their own emotional responses or emotional atrophy. They look to the women in their lives not only to explain their feelings but also to somehow tell them what they are feeling.

In this book, the hero, Sullivan, or Sully for short, is an incredibly funny and heartwarming character. He is the classical “not measuring up to ability and potential” male character that the reader loves to smile at. And yet the very best characters in the novel, all women, seem genuinely to love him. And unlike most of the female characters in Russo’s other books, there are at least two women in this novel who are more than cardboard cut-outs who stand for the good. Miss. Beryl, a retired schoolteacher in her seventies who has taught almost everyone in the small upstate New York town, is Sully’s benevolent landlady. She loves him (and puts up with him) in spite of the fact that he continually drops cigarette ash on her rugs and furniture, tracks mud and dirt without ever seeming to notice what he is doing, and threatens with his carelessly mislaid cigarettes to burn down her entire house (as he has already done to the house containing his former apartment). Though everyone knows her as Miss Beryl, she is, in fact, a widow who talks everyday and often both to her departed husband and to a male African mask on her wall. This convenient device of the aging retired teacher talking to herself allows Russo to comment not only on the departed highschool coach husband, but also the ruthless and greedy capitalist son and on the unreliable nature of men in general. And while Miss Beryl is a little too good to be true, a little too selfless, nevertheless she allows Russo a mouthpiece that shows clearly that he knows a lot more about men and their shortcomings than I had earlier given him credit for. I had thought earlier that he inadvertently exposes his own sexism and sentimentalism (his essentialist leanings) as he creates his male characters and their relationships. Miss Beryl’s shrewd observations convince me that Russo is quite well aware of the faults his male characters make manifest.

Sully also has a lover, Ruth or Ruthie, married to a lazy jerk; despite her infidelity, Ruth is wise and good. Ruth is even less believable and less developed as a character than Miss Beryl, but she does allow the reader to see that Russo is intentionally exposing a great deal about the shortcomings and blindness of men. Interestingly, Ruth finally realizes that she must turn away from Sully, that he is not enough and that he is frightened by the very thought of being somehow a truly reliable friend. Still, the relationship that Russo describes between these two does a lot to convince me that he is much more aware of just what he is doing than I had thought. Even if his characters don’t learn very much from the good women around them, it seems clear to me that Russo has. Indeed, though I may be reading more into this novel than is there, it now seems to me that Sully is supposed to be exposing the error of the very sort of essentialism that I had earlier thought Russo, himself, to be guilty of.

Having said this much that is good about the novel, let me add a few comments that may be critical, but may also, in fact, simply be more evidence of how skillful Russo is in bringing out of concealment the blindness of many men. Although Miss Beryl and Ruth occupy key side-roles in this novel, it is obvious that the real love-affairs are between the men. Sully loves to hate and plot against his greedy, entrepreneurial boss Carl, and to tease and emotionally abuse his rather dim sidekick and work-mate, Rub. The portrait of men showing their deep-seated love and fascination for each other via rather brutal teasing and pranksterism is, I think, well articulated. Again, for a period of time, I thought this to be unintentional on Russo’s part—thought that he was not really aware that the women in the story are sidelights, there to represent morality and caring, but occupying no really significant role in the lives of the star characters, while it is the men who, even with their fighting and backbiting, are the real friends and lovers. There is no doubt that it is the male relationships that are featured, but I am now quite certain that Russo wants the reader to see this—wants to show the reader that despite marriages and children, good and bad sexual relating, the essential and binding relationships for the men are with each other, and that he sees this as both a description of the real world and as a kind of comedic tragedy.

Let me quote just one passage that seems to indicate pretty clearly that Russo is quite aware of the commentary he is providing about men and their relationships. At one point the wealthy womanizer and boss, Carl, is criticizing Sully for his relentless teasing of poor Rub.

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“I don’t believe I’m hearing this from you,” Sully said. “When have you ever done anything but insult him?”

“There’s a difference, Sully,” Carl said without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.

“What difference is that Carl?” Sully said, flicking the remains of his cigarette. “Tell me why your ragging is okay and mine isn’t, because I want to hear this.”

“Because he’s not in love with me,” Carl said.

“Get the fuck away,” Sully said, genuinely furious now, sliding off the tailgate. “He’s no more queer than you.”

“I know it,” Carl said. “But he’d blow you on the four corners at high noon if you asked him to, and you know that, Sully.”

In fact, Sully did know it, or knew the power of Rub’s devotion....

At any rate, I recommend Russo to you as an author, and this book in particular. While it may be a rather sad commentary on how men show their love for one another, and even on the ineffectual manner in which many men fight the power-structure simply by a rebellious dropping out, I think it also provides an oblique critique of the moneyed patriarchy. I intend to read more of him, and I would not be surprised if I continue to modify my earlier rather casual dismissal of his social and political acumen.

Straight Man by Richard Russo

This morning, though it may surprise you, I want to talk to you about a male author, and not just to pan him or to complain about the self-absorption of male writers. I read a number of male authors this past summer, and among the very best of those is Richard Russo. Today, I want to talk to you primarily about his novel Straight Man (published in ‘97), but I will mention also a much earlier book of his, The Risk Pool.

Let me begin by saying that Russo is a superb writer—a genuine craftsman of words. His narrative flows, his characters live and breathe, and there is a surprising amount of content in his books (beyond the existential self-absorption of so many even good male authors). His stories draw you along, and his characters seem to move of their own volition; you do not constantly feel his presence in the wings, making his characters do things for him in order to either get across his points or simply make him money.

Perhaps the story-line in Straight Man is particularly interesting to me because it is an insider’s view of universities, of the politics that rule there, the petty feuds and ego-wars, the power of administrators (mostly for ill, but occasionally for good), and the incredibly jaundiced views that many professors have of their students. Russo is wise enough to see, at least at times, that it is mainly the bad teachers who see their students as fools and drones—that it is their own lack of enthusiasm for their subjects and/or real attention to their students that leads them to conclude that is the students, rather than themselves, who are in need of an overhaul. As Rebecca Goldstein has revealed so well and with such humor in The Mind-Body Problem, many university professors see their own academic work and careers as the really important business of universities, and they lament each Fall when the students come back and get in the way. While administrators and academic unions pay lip service to teaching ability, it is well known from within that it is publication in professional journals that determines pay and promotion. Indeed, the more attention teachers pay to students, to reading and commenting on papers, to conferencing in sustained and intense ways, and to constantly preparing for and changing their basic courses, the less time they have for professional meetings and for working on (often esoteric) academic writing. Thus, if career and promotion are the main goals, then teachers ‘can’ their courses (meaning that they do not revise, do not refresh, they simply teach what they have taught), and, predictably, they ignore students.

Instead of merely saying all of these things, Russo shows the reader how it all works. How teachers turn the blame on students when their own performances are desultory or worse, and how the pressure to publish or perish leads quite naturally to worse and worse teaching. Russo’s telling of the story is very, very funny, almost as humorous as Jane Smiley’s wonderful laugh at academia in Moo. And while Russo is hard on teachers, he is sympathetic as well; he realizes very well the conflicting demands that are placed on them, and the bad consciences that lead them finally to malign the very students they are shortchanging.

While it is always dangerous to conclude that the views of the narrator of a novel are also those of the author, I have to add here that humor and insight aside, Straight Man is still too hard on students. He speaks of the “militant ignorance” of today’s students. And in another passage says, “This particular group of students, like so many these days, seems divided, unequally, between the vocal clueless and the quietly pensive,” and he complains again and again of student apathy and boredom. No doubt there are a lot of bored and apathetic students, but in my thirty years of teaching, it is the students who provided the fire; it was they in whom I witnessed over and over an intellectual curiosity and desire to learn that kept me alive, kept me reading and wanting to find better ways to teach, kept me experimenting with writing assignments that would, more and more (instead of less and less) tap their creativity and feed the curiosity, convince them of their own abilities. Perhaps the difference is that Russo is talking of a rather small-city university with predominantly young students, unlike the urban campus and the wonderful age mix that I experienced at Portland State University. I noticed plenty of teacher apathy and discontent, but in almost every class there were some, often many, students who thrived on real attention to them as learners and who grew and changed before my eyes.

At any rate, a reader could get much from this book simply because of the insights it gives us into university life and the toll that underfunding and overcrowding has had on state institutions. In addition, and much to his credit, Russo really wants to talk about and describe and understand human relationships. He is more than willing to talk about emotion, and about the one-dimensional emotional plasticity of so many men. Indeed, instead of seeing women as lacking something (reason or logic or true intelligence), he sees clearly that it is men who lack what May Sarton has called emotional intelligence. However, in his zeal to talk about what men lack and what women (at least often) have, I think Russo makes a mistake almost as grievous as the male authors who dismiss women as weak or illogical. The lead character has a deep respect for his wife and for her ability to understand both him and their children, and he sees a corresponding lack in himself. But even as he extols her virtues, her emotional insight, he seems to embrace a kind of essentialism that is very dangerous in its own way. In both books I am talking about today, Russo describes men who suffer from a physically or emotionally absent father, and who clearly see a depth to their mothers simply not had by the fathers. But he treats that depth as some sort of mystery, not only unknown, but unknowable by men. And, clearly, the danger with that sort of essentialism is that it lets men of the hook by claiming that they are unable to really understand or even really attend to their children and spouses.

Without giving away much of the plot, let me quote a couple of passages that I think evidence this sort of slide into essentialist adoration. In the first, the male lead character is trying to comfort his adult daughter who is in distress about her own marriage.

Throughout this exchange, Julie has made no move to get up from the sofa, and I have not taken so much as a step toward her. What we’re missing, of course, what we need most, is Lily {the wife and mother}, not so much so we’ll know what to do as so we’ll know how to feel, to be sure which emotions are valid. There are times when I can read my wife’s soul in her face, and in such moments I can almost read my own.

In another passage, our hero is feeling lost and lonely because his wife is away on a trip while his relationships with his daughters and his colleagues are deteriorating.

... it’s both wonderful and oddly sad to hear the familiar voice of this woman who shares my life, to feel how much I’ve missed it. By what magic does she softly say my name and so doing restore me to myself? More important, why am I so often ungrateful for this gift? Is it because her magic also dispels magic?

And when he begins to express the troubles his daughter is having in her own marriage, troubles that he was blithely ignorant off until his daughter calls him in a frenzy, his wife explains that the trouble has been brewing for along time. He says, “Why didn’t I know it?” And, after a pause, she responds, “I don’t know Hank. Why don’t you know these things.” And she has to explain to him that he depends on her to know them.

Of course, he does depend on her to attend, to really look, and that conveniently excuses his failure to do so. But it is not good enough to say that she succeeds in attending because she is a woman (with her magic) and that he fails because he is a man and lacks that magic. It is not magic; it is, rather, the difference between really attending and not doing so.

I admire Russo for noticing how emotionally bankrupt many men are, how hollow they are as parents, as spouses, even as friends, and I applaud him for calling them to task for it, for seeing it as a lack. But, at least in these two books, he seems to be suggesting that it cannot be otherwise. We need the magic of women, we need their emotional intelligence in order to complete ourselves as persons, as caretakers. I certainly agree that many/most men need to learn to attend better, to see the lack of emotional intelligence as a lack rather than a strength, and I also agree that one is more likely to find genuine morality (attention) in women, but it does not have to be that way. It is not that women are essentially good or caring and men essentially bad or selfish. We men can become more attentive partners, better parents, better friends (who learn how to listen, to suspend, at least momentarily, the veil of selfishness through which we usually see the world). Like racist essentialism, essentialism with respect to sex is neither helpful nor true.

To recap, Richard Russo is a fine writer and one who wants to talk about important social and political issues (though he may sacrifice content for humor a bit too often). Unlike many masturbatory male authors absorbed by their own adventures and need for freedom, he sees lacks, realizes a need for men to complete themselves, to acknowledge and try to understand relationships and emotions, though he (in my opinion) opts too easily and too early for an essentialism that gives into a spurious necessity.