(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

As regular readers know, artistic criticism is something fairly new to me (or at least regular artistic criticism is), with the entire thing being as much of a learning process for me as it often is for you; and of all the new things I am learning about the subject these days, one of the most surprising is of just how strongly our opinion of a project is influenced by which station in life we ourselves are at when coming across it. For example, as someone who tries to heavily cover the field of "indie lit" or "underground lit" or whatever you want to call it, I am of course constantly coming across novels designed to appeal primarily to those in their twenties, full of gimmicks and pop-culture references and other signs of its young demographics; and every time I come across one of these books, I always think about how much more it would've appealed to me at the age of 23 then it currently does at 38, and how what I write about it is heavily influenced by that. What I'm learning, in fact, is that the best critics must learn how to balance this subject when it comes to their finished essays -- that the most effective reviews are the ones that can take all kinds of different audience attitudes in mind while still acknowledging the biases of that specific reviewer, without apologizing for either aspect but rather trying to synthesize the two as much as possible.

A very good example of what I'm talking about, in fact, can be seen in today's novel under review, former Pulitzer winner Richard Russo's latest hefty saga about small-town life, Bridge of Sighs; because let's make it clear right off the bat, that this is a slow-moving academic-friendly novel about a bunch of old people in a rural east-coast environment, who spend most of their time sitting around and thinking about old-person stuff, a novel that if I had come across in my early twenties would've been highly tempted to scoff at and roll my eyes. Now that I'm in the lower rungs of middle-age, however, I found myself a lot more intrigued; I ended up liking the book quite a bit, to tell you the truth, although acknowledge that it has some serious flaws when it comes to the plotting of the overall storyline (but more on that in a bit). And what's even more, I can tell that I'm not even the main target audience to begin with -- that in actuality, this novel is primarily designed to appeal to people in their fifties and sixties, those just entering the winter of their lives for the first time, naturally obsessed with looking over the whole of their adulthoods, ruminating on where things went right and where they went wrong. And so that leads to an intriguing question -- that as a guy just now entering his forties, with a huge section of readership in their twenties and thirties, what exactly should I say about a book like this? Do I recommend it but with an asterisk? Do I suggest skipping it but with a caveat? Sheesh, who knew that being an artistic critic was such a hard job?!

I guess, then, let's start with this, that Russo is in fact precisely known for gentle slow-moving ruminations on small-town life; that's what his Pulitzer-winning novel was about as well, after all, 2001's Empire Falls, as well as...