cover image The Goat Bridge

The Goat Bridge

T. M. McNally, . . Univ. of Michigan, $24 (310pp) ISBN 978-0-472-11511-2

McNally's taut, richly textured and assured third novel follows Stephen Brings, a burnt-out American photographer who is reeling from the unexplained disappearance of his son in Rome, and who finds an unlikely measure of understanding and acceptance in the wartorn Sarajevo of the early '90s. Brings, pointedly not "covering" the war in any conventional sense, drifts through the city, helping where he can, taking the occasional photograph and forming attachments with a vividly sketched group of locals, diplomats and journalists, including the German journalist Elise, with whom he begins a tentative affair. Living under the grim realities of siege, McNally's characters argue, flirt and philosophize endlessly, incrementally edging his protagonist from his emotional cocoon even as bullets strike and mortars explode. McNally's epigrammatic prose nicely mirrors disruptions to Brings's understandable bewilderment and self-absorption, balancing horror and fear with moments of beauty and humor. Touched with some of the aphoristic delicacy of Milan Kundera, and searching in the mode of Graham Greene, McNally's tale of redemption nonetheless has a sinewy elegance entirely its own. Agent, Joy Harris . (Sept.)