Oprah Winfrey joins “CBS Mornings” with author Richard Russo to discuss her latest selection, “Bridge of Sighs.” Dive into “Bridge of Sighs” with this reader’s guide.
Reader’s Guide Questions
1. Bridge of Sighs alternates two narratives: Lucy’s first-person memoir and the story of Robert Noonan. What are the advantages of this structure? How does it affect the way the plot unfolds? Does it influence your impressions of the main characters?
2. How does Lucy’s description of Thomaston create an immediate sense of time and place [pp. 10–13]? What details did you find particularly evocative? What does Lucy’s tone, as well as the way he presents various facts about Thomaston and its history, reveal about his perceptiveness and his intelligence?
3. Lucy says, “I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?” [p. 14]. To what extent does this feeling lie at the heart of his decision to write his book? Does it play a central role in memoir-writing in general? What else does Lucy hope to accomplish by recalling his past?
4. The horrific prank the neighborhood boys play on Lucy triggers the first of many “spells” he will have throughout his life [pp. 25–36]. What is the significance of his spells? What do they reveal about the emotional attachments, anxieties, and doubts that define him both as a child and as an adult?
5. Lucy makes many references to the pursuit of the American Dream and its implications within his own family and in society in general [pp. 62–66, 93–94, 110–111, for example]. In what ways did American attitudes in the postwar years embody both the best parts of our national character and its darker undercurrents? What incidents in the novel illuminate the uneasiness and enmity that results from the class, racial, and economic divisions in Thomaston? Do Lucy’s beliefs, judgments, and achievements (as a businessman and as a happily married husband and father) color his reconstruction of these events?
6. Unlike Lucy’s story, Noonan’s story is told in the third person. Is the change of voice a literary device, a way of adding variety to the novel, or does it serve another purpose? In what ways does it help to convey the basic difference between Lucy and Noonan and the way they see themselves and their place in the world? Compare the tone and language Russo uses in creating Lucy’s voice with the…
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