Enza Gandolfo’s second novel is set in Yarraville, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where the author grew up in a migrant family. In 1970, when the Westgate Bridge collapsed during construction, Gandolfo was thirteen, a student at the local high school. The industrial accident that left thirty-five men dead had a lasting impact on the working-class community and on the author, who uses the disaster as a springboard for her novel. The arc of the bridge – romantic in its conception, monstrous in its incarnation – overshadows the story, an ominous presence that binds the characters into their grief and inhibits any attempt to forget.

The bridge’s collapse is told through the story of a twenty-one-year-old rigger from Sicily. Antonello, a finely wrought character, is newly married to Paolina. We meet them first in tender moments, happy and optimistic, when the bridge is just another half-made dream, one that Antonello sketches at sunset on the banks of the Yarra. When the bridge collapses, so does their dream. With three of his closest workmates dead, Antonello struggles to live with the shame of being a survivor. Although it is easy to blame the accident on the companies or the engineers, the survivors also carry a burden of guilt. When the bosses take shortcuts, removing bolts to force the two spans of the bridge into alignment, the workers know the dangers. Their reluctance to speak out contributes to the disaster.

The Bridge has echoes of Gandolfo’s previous novel, Swimming, which I reviewed for ABR in 2010. It too is set in the western suburbs and driven by a wave of memories, regret, and guilt. Semi-autobiographical, Swimming alternated between first and third person, with the first person woman’s voice more intimate and moving. While The Bridge’s third person account lacks some of that intimacy, it is a more dramatic and dynamic novel.

Within fifty pages, we have moved on almost forty years, skipping a generation, to 2009, but still in the shadow of the bridge. Antonello surfaces as a broken man, a stranger within his family. His wife is gravely ill. When tragedy strikes again, he is caught up in the trauma. The Westgate Bridge is now a barrage of traffic, the neighbourhood crowded and noisy. Gandolfo conjures up Melbourne in vivid detail: the smells and sounds of the western suburbs, the beggars on Swanston Street, the gleaming city towers, the European and Gopals restaurants.

A new protagonist emerges. Jo, nineteen and about to sit her VCE exams, lives with her mother in a cramped house near the bridge. Anxious, insecure, she fights her mother for some kind of autonomy. She has one: her driving licence, and the responsibility of being the designated driver among her slightly younger friends. But, unlike her best friend Ash – beautiful, secure, full of promise – her future is uncertain.

Enza GandolfoJo’s character promises a coming-of-age story of teenage angst, friendship under stress, and family conflict. But Gandolfo uses Jo as a tighter focus for the theme of culpability and an opportunity to concentrate her empathy on someone who is both perpetrator and victim. When an accident rocks the foundations of two families in the neighbourhood, the onus is on Jo, who blames herself. So does everyone else, including her mother. The frail young woman retreats to her room, where we are privy to her despair, her suicidal thoughts, and her bodily distress. Through her, we experience the impact of trauma, grief, and the confusion of moral quandaries. No one – Jo’s mother in particular – is free from blame, but the law is clear: Jo is under interrogation. In times of grief, the older women still turn to their rosary beads. Others invoke fate and luck, but, as Sarah, the wonderfully shambolic but clear-headed Legal Aid lawyer, states, ‘All human tragedy is caused by the failure of someone to understand and conquer their own flaws.’

This is a novel about everyday tragedy written in everyday language. Clarity prevails over lyricism. Dialogue is colloquial and lively. Carefully articulated sentences give way, in moments of anger, to more truncated phrasing and, in the closing chapters, to snappier prose that creates a sense of urgency. Overall, more rigorous editing of superfluous words would have made for greater elegance.

Gandolfo’s prose may not have the subtlety of some stylists, but her skill as a storyteller and her ability to create complex and empathetic characters gives weight to her fiction and invites the reader to question her own integrity and sense of self-worth, not without compassion.