Upstate.('Bridge of Sighs')(Book review)

"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 a problem a thousand times more consequential to those who make their living running deli counters. Russo is committed to inventing this sort of problem, the macaroni-salad problem, and then taking it seriously. He is a sentimental, humorous, ruminative, occasionally satirical, and extremely unhurried writer. "Wry" is a word that people have applied to his style, and it is a just and proper word.

The biggest small-town novel of all is Grace Metalious's "Peyton Place," which appeared in 1956, a publishing blockbuster that featured rape, incest, and suicide (also, a castle built by a renegade escaped slave) in a northern New England town. Russo is a far gentler writer: there are a number of surprisingly bloody fistfights in "Bridge of Sighs," but the characters' sexual secrets are relatively ordinary. Ordinariness is the point. Russo is much more interested in what happens when a new A. & P. comes to town--it puts the milkman out of work and the corner grocery store out of business--than in imagining a lurid underside to the lives of people who are preoccupied mainly with finding new ways to keep their heads above water. He is a novelistic chronicler of the postwar metamorphosis of places like Thomaston--or like Empire Falls, the Maine town in his last novel, which was published in 2001--from self-sufficient centers of minor industry into faceless, interchangeable nodes in the giant exurban sprawl. Still, though the sexual secrets aren't terribly scandalous, there are a lot of them in the novel. It is, in its anti-sensational way, a high-quality soap opera about the loves and rivalries of a few local families over two generations, and the soapy stuff is what pulls the reader along.

The Bridge of Sighs is not, of course, near Lake George. It's in Venice, and though a small part of the action does take place there, it's nothing that might not have been set in Paris or Rome. Placing a few characters in Venice seems mainly an excuse to appropriate the phrase "bridge of sighs" and endow it with a symbolic significance that is a little nebulous but seems to have something to do with the notion of an alternative life. The persistent anxiety of the characters is that they will end up exactly like their parents--that growing up in an insular place like Thomaston will leave them no chance to develop, or even to imagine, a different kind of life, or a different mode of being.

In the case of the narrator, his anxiety is that he doesn't really feel this anxiety: he wants to be just like his father, also Lou Lynch, a farm boy who became a milkman and, when that business failed, the owner of a ...