The lives of the Lynches, the Bergs, and the Marconis interconnect and clash throughout a five-decade course of social and cultural history. Lou's amiable father is a milkman blind to the industry obsolescence headed his way, and then when he impulsively buys a corner market in times of rising A&P-dom, the success of his new career in shopkeeping is largely dependent on his wife’s new-found and innovative marketing and merchandising skills. Sarah divides her time between her divorced parents: a beatnik schoolteacher daddy-o with delusions of literary grandeur and a promiscuous mother with no illusions at all. Bobby's family is being destroyed by an abusive father to such an extent that he legally changes his last name to Noonan, his forever-pregnant mother’s maiden name, and eventually moves to Venice, Italy.

That was where Noonan used his 60-year-old hindsight to see what had eluded him in the past, as he more fully perceives the narrative of life as rendered by Russo, replete with schoolyard brawls, night terrors and spells, illness and initiations, homosexual advances, loveless seductions, racial tensions — all incidents split onto two tracks running closely parallel: "He and his friends were on one, their parents on another, and neither group realized until it was too late that the tracks convergence in the distance was no optical illusion. The Marcos, the Lynches ... and the Bergs. Not one of those families would emerge unscathed from the collision."

But some repercussions may be fully determined with just a cursory assessment. At one point in Bridge of Sighs, Lou ponders the prospect of crawling from the wreckage as he has occasion to test an endurance he may never — if he must — be able to sustain. Looking over at a sleeping Sarah he wonders "how I’ll manage without her, absent her ability to see what’s there instead of what I prefer to see. I’ll have to make sense of things for myself. She’ll wake up soon and then be gone, so for a while I’ll watch her breathe and dream. So lovely."

You can almost hear him sigh. Like it was said the prisoners, who had crossed the Bridge of Sighs, would do at their final window view of beautiful Venice before being taken down to their cells.