BRIDGE OF SIGHS by Richard Russo

Here's another really good story: four families in a small town, Thomaston, New York: the Lynchs, Marconis, Bergs, and the Beverleys. Louis ( known as Lucy) is now 60 years old, and he and his wife Sarah (Berg) are about to visit an old friend in Italy.  Lucy, whose story is told in first-person narrative, tells the story of his growing up, while the others, most notably Bobby Marconi and Sarah Berg, tell their story in third person.  We see how the four families are connected, then finally converge, but the interesting thing about the book is the fact that the town itself and the store the Lynch family runs, called Ikey Lubins, are as much characters as the family members;amidst all this is a river spewing forth waste which affects the health of many of the people.  It's a nostalgic look back, to be sure, and not so pleasant at times, but there's a depth and richness to the story that had me reading late at night. There are some weaknesses: Nan is just a bit of fluff, I'm not sure why new characters appeared near the end of the story, and I really think the novel could have been a good 100 pages shorter.  Maybe I was getting restive about the ending, but I felt a definite let-down about 100 pages from the end.  This is the third of Russo's novels that I've read: the others are Nobody's Fool, which was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, and Empire Falls, both of these stories about small-town America .