Mrs. Bridge: A Novel [Paperback]

Evan S. Connell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1990

Before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique there was Mrs. Bridge, an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testified to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life. India Bridge, the title character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has the gall to dry his hands on one, and earnestly attempts to control her daughters with pronouncements such as "Now see here, young lady ... in the morning one doesn't wear earrings that dangle." Though her life is increasingly filled with leisure and plenty, she can't shuffle off vague feelings of dissatisfaction, confusion, and futility. Evan S. Connell, who also wrote the twinned novel Mr. Bridge, builds a world with tiny brushstrokes and short, telling vignettes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique there was Mrs. Bridge, an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testified to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life. India Bridge, the title character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has the gall to dry his hands on one, and earnestly attempts to control her daughters with pronouncements such as "Now see here, young lady ... in the morning one doesn't wear earrings that dangle." Though her life is increasingly filled with leisure and plenty, she can't shuffle off vague feelings of dissatisfaction, confusion, and futility. Evan S. Connell, who also wrote the twinned novel Mr. Bridge, builds a world with tiny brushstrokes and short, telling vignettes.

Review

"A hell of a portrait." --Wallace Stegner

"For all their satire and dark implications, the novels of the Bridge family remain in the memory as triumphs of faultless realism. Mr. Connell's art is one of restraint and perfect mimicry." --The New York Times

"The reissue of these classic American novels is an event to be celebrated.... Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are forever human, forever vulnerable, forever pitiable. In spare, whimsical, ironic prose, Connell exposes each and every one of their wrinkles and then, in the , offers them to us as human beings to be cherished." --Jonathan Yardley

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Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (September 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865470561
• ISBN-13: 978-0865470569
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #814,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Forgotten Classic of American Literature, September 19, 2000

By 

David Benioff (Otisville, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mrs. Bridge: A Novel (Paperback)

When I finished this book I started raving about it to all my friends. "What's it about?" they asked. "Um, this housewife in Kansas City." "Yeah, but what happens?" "Er... nothing really. She gets married and has kids and they grow up."

But trying to summarize "Mrs. Bridge" cannot evoke the brilliance and heartbreak of this novel. Evan Connell understands his characters so well that he simply lets them be, allows them to breathe. "Simply" is the wrong word; few writers are gifted enough to pull off an essentially plotless novel. But "Mrs. Bridge" is never boring.

Incidentally, another reviewer writes about wanting to smack Mrs. Bridge's face. Such a reaction is the exact opposite of mine. Yes, she is guilty of class and racial prejudices; yes, she is repressed. All those with no sins cast the first stone, or smack, and get on with your righteous lives. For the rest of us, it's hard not to sympathize with a woman who struggles all her life to do the right thing, despite having a vague sense that she has never learned the right thing. She longs for something else, something more, but she is barely aware of the longing.

Some day this book will achieve its rightful place as a masterpiece of American realist fiction. But you should read it before that.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars compelling portrait of Americana, December 24, 2001

By 

Michel Aaij (Montgomery, AL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mrs. Bridge (Audio Cassette)

Denounced in 1959 for not being a 'real' novel, Mrs. Bridge is judged differently these days--and rightly so. The novel is a compelling portrait of American suburban bourgeois life; reading it causes precisely the same claustrophobia Mrs. Bridge sometimes realizes she's suffering from. In a way, this is Sartre's La Nausee moved to Kansas City, but an easier read--almost deceptively so. Closing the book though doesn't really relieve the angst the reader shares with poor Mrs. Bridge in the final section (no I won't give it away)--this book is too real. Don't look for plot, don't look for cheap thrills, but do look for detail, look for the Real peeking into Mrs. Bridge's seemingly perfect life in the Imaginary.

I'll be brief: others have said plenty. Just one quick remark: Connell is a stylist of the highest order. His prose is crisp; style matches subject matter. Example: "It was necessary to be careful among people you did not know." Every sentence is carefully crafted to the point where grammar itself becomes a web of cleanliness, clear and transparent. It may seem nothing special, but Connell is a craftsman. All the more striking, both in grammar and in plot, are the few moments, aporia, where something else could have happened--such as when Mr. Bridge is breathlessly studying, in Paris, "a black lace brassiere with the tips cut off," a moment Mrs. Bridge returns to later with vague uneasiness.

I am glad I was recently introduced to Connell's work. It is a treasure trove, and it's a pity so few of his works are still in print. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more of his novels to read: Deus Lo Volt! is next.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliantly Wrought Fiction of Upper Middle Class Ennui, April 29, 2002

By 

"botatoe" (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mrs. Bridge: A Novel (Paperback)

Evan S. Connell's "Mrs. Bridge" is one of the truly outstanding works of Twentieth century American literature, a restrained, yet brilliantly wrought fictional portrait of upper middle class married life in the decades surrounding World War II. Connell tells the story of India Bridge in 117 short chapters, each a spare vignette of her enervated life in the perfectly manicured "country-club district" of an affluent Kansas City suburb. Linear in its narrative and meticulously realistic in its style, "Mrs. Bridge" follows India's life from marriage, to the birth of three children, to the rejection by those children of the repressed life of their parents as they grow into adults, to lonely suburban widowhood. While it is, at its heart, a grim tale of one woman's life of repression and, ultimately, loneliness and resignation, Connell's flawless and restrained narrative ultimately leaves the reader feeling exhilarated at the sheer literary achievement of "Mrs. Bridge".

Ostensibly the story of a marriage, Mr. Bridge is noticeably absent from much of the narrative. A successful lawyer, he is a man who is unable to express love or affection for his wife or his children, a man who is focussed on becoming "rich and successful," the epitome of the status-conscious husband and father whose identity lies in material possessions. "The family saw very little of him. It was not unusual for an entire week to pass without any of the children seeing him. On Sunday morning they would come downstairs and he . . . greeted them pleasantly and they responded deferentially, and a little wistfully because they missed him. Sensing this, he would redouble his efforts at the office in order to give them everything they wanted."

Mrs. Bridge, too, is powerfully repressed, unable to articulate her feelings of dissatisfaction, a woman who is beholden to the expectations of respectability and obsessed with appearances. "She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others." Thus, she ultimately drives all three of her children from her life, her unthinking obeisance to social convention destroying any thread of relationship that she might have had with them. Her oldest daughter, "curiously dark", flees to New York City, where she pursues her more unconventional dreams. Her second daughter, an accomplished golfer, enters an ill-fated marriage with a college dropout who cannot provide the country club life that she has been weaned to expect. Her son joins the army, asserting an act of individuality that Mrs. Bridge never seems able to accept or reconcile.

It is, most notably, however, in her relationships with her peers-with the other affluent housewives of the "country-club district"-that the grim and vapid nature of Mrs. Bridge's life becomes most apparent. In particular, her friend Grace Barron becomes a kind of outward manifestation of India Bridge's discontent, someone who lives a life of equal desperation, but not so quietly as Mrs. Bridge. Grace Barron "was a puzzle and was disturbing" to Mrs. Bridge. Why? Because she actually questioned the life she led, moving outside the banal, the conventional, if only in her discourse. As Grace once said to Mrs. Bridge: "India, I've never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything. I don't know how other people live, or think, even how they believe. Are we right? Do we believe the right things?"

Unlike Mrs. Bridge, who talked of "antique silver, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, the price of margarine as compared to butter, or what the hemline was expected to do," Grace Barron talked of "art, politics, astronomy, literature." Ultimately, Grace cannot cope with the ennui, the claustrophobia of her life, and she does what Mrs. Bridge ultimately lacks the fortitude to do; in a sense, Grace is a sort of "double" who acts out the dark alternative to Mrs. Bridge's repression. And when Grace does act, all that comes to Mrs. Bridge's mind is something Grace once said to her: "Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale-the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?"