In Bridge of Clay, Markus Zusak takes a long-winded 583 pages to tell us the story of how one father walked back into the lives of the five sons he abandoned following their mother’s death. Chronologically, the story begins when Michael Dunbar suffers a life-crushing breakup while simultaneously, on the other side of the world, Penelope Lesciouszko is sent away to Australia to escape communist Poland. These two lonely people traverse through the winding paths of life to end up at the right place and the right time. Like something fated in the stars, once they meet, they fall almost immediately in love.
As the years pass, Penelope and Michael cultivate a close-to-perfect life. Together they have five sons — all with unique personalities, all bringing something new and fresh to the family dynamic. Unfortunately, hardship and grief come to the family when Penelope is diagnosed with cancer. Still, through her illness, the Dunbars manage to find joy in the simple things. That is until the dreaded moment arrives when Penelope passes away.
It’s all too much for Michael to bear so, adding salt to the brothers’ wounds, he abandons them, leaving his five boys to raise themselves. They survive by constructing a world of organized chaos in which — to say the very least — a mule is brought into the house as a pet.
Many years later, Michael reappears and requests his sons to help him build a bridge. Indignant, they all reject his offer — except for Clay, the most passive and sensitive of the five brothers. Inadvertently betraying his brothers, Clay leaves to be with his father to build a literal and figurative bridge.
Zusak moves forward and backward through the timeline telling the story, building up to reveal the true reason Michael left. However, he takes too many long and winding turns to arrive at the climax so that when he finally does deliver it, it falls almost completely flat.
The story is most rewarding in the flashbacks to Michael and Penelope’s beginnings. However, when it returns to the portion involving present-day characters, Zusak struggles to keep the reader’s attention or to make us care about them. The main character, Clay, is portrayed as a quiet boy and different from the rest. He’s displayed as mysterious and misunderstood. But after about 400 pages of being told the same things about Clay in different ways, when we find out why it is that Clay is this way, the reader is just too blasé to care.
In a nutshell, Bridge of Clay is boring and tedious. Zusak’s writing can usually make you want to savor every single word he writes. But this time around, his style of prose — the way he finds it necessary to be poetic about the broken air conditioning — becomes exhausting. It gets in the way of a story that is otherwise an engaging observation of familial life. There is just too much unnecessary, sometimes repetitive, lyrical detail. It’s simply 583 pages too long. This is a shame because The Book Thief is one of my all-time favorites. I never thought I’d ever read a book by Zusak that would have me desperately searching for the point and wishing he would just get on with it.
Is this to say that simple stories should not and cannot be told beautifully or poetically? Of course, they can. But there’s a very fine balance to be met. Sometimes too much of a good thing is just too much. Unfortunately, in Bridge of Clay, Zusak completely misses the mark.