Las Vegas Review-Journal - The Book Nook

  Richard Russo is widely recognized as one of the great living writers of fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 novel “Empire Falls,” which was turned into an HBO miniseries with a big cast of stars, including Ed Harris, Paul Newman, Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman. An earlier novel, “Nobody’s Fool,” became a movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis that received two Academy Award nominations. My personal favorite of his novels, “Straight Man,” manages to be both riotously funny and darkly poignant.
  Russo’s latest novel, 2007’s “Bridge of Sighs,” is, like all his others, wonderfully and expertly crafted. Anyone aspiring to be a fiction writer is inclined to give up the dream after reading Russo. When you read his novels, you notice a couple of key things:
  1. There are no weak spots, no creases, no signs of a writer painting himself into a corner or struggling to climb out of a hole. The story is seamless and true.
  2. Because the story is seamless and true, the sentences and paragraphs so perfectly rendered, you easily find yourself forgetting that you are engaging in the act of reading a book. The cliché applies: You get so lost in the story that you forget you are sitting on the couch in your living room.
  What Russo does so well is create vivid settings (mostly small communities in the Northeast) and completely believable characters. But what makes him great, I think, is that his characters are called on to confront the desires and regrets, hopes and anxieties, that boil within all of us and only occasionally rise to the surface of our lives. When you finish a Russo novel, you feel you have really learned something about how human beings function.
  In lesser hands, a typical Russo story could be interminably boring. But he succeeds in making a piece of so-called literary fiction into a potboiler. As things come to a head, you just have to know how it all turns out. There is not likely to be a car chase or a shootout but the tension exists nonetheless.