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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"My natural inclination," says the narrator on the first page of Richard Russo's "Bridge of Sighs" (Knopf; $26.95), is "inertia rationalized." His name is Lou Lynch, and he is working on a memoir, which constitutes much of the novel we will be reading, and which, he says, might deserve the title "The Dullest Story Ever Told." Not the most auspicious way to begin a five-hundred-page book. And Lynch is, truthfully, a pretty dull guy. He operates a commercial mini-empire consisting of three convenience stores (a chief source of profit is the sale of Lotto tickets), a video rental, and a seasonal ice-cream shop in one of those towns in the land that time forgot, upstate New York. This one is called Thomaston, and it is situated in a fictional spot north of Albany, near Lake George--the kind of place where people think of moving to Schenectady as making it.
It's a tiny anthill. But the ant's a centaur in his dragon world (as Pound put it), and dramatic intensity is proportional to its setting. A boy may be falling out of the sky, but whether there is enough macaroni salad at the deli counter is...
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