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"  With his latest novel, Bridge of Sighs (Knopf; $26.95), Richard Russo returns to long-form and to the dying industrial towns of upstate New York. The story centers on Lou C. Lynch (cruelly nicknamed Lucy), a native of fictional Thomaston who decides to write his memoirs of growing up in the 1950s. Childhood is never an idyllic time in Russo novels, and Lucy is depicted beautifully as an anxious, lonely kid who learns to love people without expecting much in return. Thomaston itself is a complex character -- its heart is a crumbling factory that provides the lion&amp;#039;s share of jobs while also polluting the local water supply and giving every third person cancer. But where Russo&amp;#039;s earlier heroes survived such dreary circumstances with a wicked sense of humor, Lucy bears it with an apologetic shrug. His passivity becomes exhausting, and Russo comes off as having tied an important hand behind his back.  Russo&amp;#039;s biggest mistake is using his characters to overtly address &amp;quot;big issues&amp;quot; like civil rights. The story stumbles badly here: Black characters are stiff and half-formed, while many white characters exist solely to pontificate. It makes you wish for the masterful chronicles of personal politics that have become Russo&amp;#039;s trademark. Those familiar with Russo will find his formidable abilities to tease out the nuances of complacency and failure in small-town America intact, though obscured. But someone who&amp;#039;s new to Russo might find Bridge of Sighs overlong and overwrought, and will run the risk of turning themselves off from a writer who is capable of much better. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a3469/bridgeofsighs092707/>