For much of Richard Russo’s writing career, personality trumps place. "I have to live in a place for a while before I can write about it," the novelist once maintained in an interview. "Sometimes I think I write more about class than I do about place, anyway ... But the class stuff, writing about blue-collar folks, is something I've been doing right from the start ... It's a world I know pretty well, and its people seem worth talking about to me."

Indeed, there is a fascination behind the faces worthy of study, starting with Russo's first novel, 1986’s Mohawk, where the off-kilter characters appear to take their cues from the same 1966 calendar at the local grill, whose owner figures the months are the same and being a few days off doesn't really matter. It's the same cavalier spirit that encroaches in the perversely winning but penetratingly witty Nobody’s Fool from 1993, wherein 60-year-old free-spirit Sully is soon out of money and out of luck, a situation triggering a series of personal and familial roll-with-the-punches obstructions of the woebegone kind.

The humor and compassion of Russo’s writing carries on into the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner Empire Falls, which sees in its locale’s northward tilt a shift in keeping with the novelist's move to Maine from upstate New York, where he grew up and set his earliest works. But a primary focus remains on characterization, especially in the intricate interplay between Russo's large ensemble of primary and fully-fleshed secondary characters, culled from a cross section of citizenry representing the depressed New England mill town central to the novel.

Now Russo, in his rewarding sixth novel, the absorbing, bittersweet, and multi-faceted Bridge of Sighs, gives as much vent to a sense of place as he does to descriptive character and "class stuff." In an assured balancing act, the author masterfully reconciles and interweaves local color and social mobility with pertinent characterization as he plays a little temporal leapfrog throughout, and though he takes the book's overall setting back to a downbeat upstate New York to do it. Shall we draw any lessons from the actual Bridge of Sighs that led to the old prisons and that was regarded — at least legendarily -- as the last view of scenic Venice (New England) that convicts saw before their imprisonment?

In any case, Bridge's Thomaston, New York, does manage to eke out its own lower-rung three-class social strata, each geographically set apart: the industrial and poor West End, and — divided by Division Street — the East End lower middle class. The third section — the Borough — is smaller by area and population, but "what little wealth we have is concentrated here." Together, however, each sector agrees to be in Chamber of Commerce-style denial about the town tannery's rising unemployment, economic decline, and runoff that is slowly spreading carcinogenic ruin.

There to chronicle much of Thomaston’s ups and downs, the familial upward mobility and personal downward spirals, is 60-year-old Lou C. Lynch (or as the nickname his middle initial has unfortunately saddled him with, Lucy), an unsophisticated, needy optimist writing a history of the town, his family, and friends — which includes his cryptic and aloof pal Bobby Marconi, who would become a celebrated expatriate artist. And which also includes Sarah Berg, an artist and teacher who also loves Bobby (reciprocating despite his thoughts of love as "the perfect recipe for disappointment and recrimination at the benign end of the emotional spectrum, homicide at the malignant end"), but who nevertheless marries Lou, "steadfast, slow, of movement, wit, and tongue … and yes, unfailingly kind."