In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. With a surgeon’s skill, Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development underneath—the entropy of time and relationships lead Mrs. Bridge's three children and husband to recede into a remote silence, and she herself drifts further into doubt and confusion. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, events—all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation. In this special fiftieth anniversary edition, we are reminded once again why Mrs. Bridge has been hailed by readers and critics alike as one of the greatest novels in American literature.
Mrs. Bridge
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“Mr. Connell writes of this woman without patronage, without snickers, without, indeed, any comment whatever on what he sets down of her life. He tells her story, less in sketches than in paragraphs, and how it is done I only wish I knew, but he makes Mrs. Bridge, her husband and her children and her neighbors understandable and, because understandable, moving, in his few taut words.” —Dorothy Parker, Esquire
“Mrs. Bridge is a hell of a portrait . . . She’s as real and as pathetic and as sad as any character I have read in a long time.” —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
“Mrs. Bridge is a hell of a portrait . . . She’s as real and as pathetic and as sad as any character I have read in a long time.” —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
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Mrs. Bridge is perhaps the most vacuous and nondescript central character in any novel that I have encountered. She is the mother of three and the wife of a lawyer sufficiently successful for her to have a full-time colored maid/cook and a once-a-week laundress, freeing her for the PTA, meetings of the ladies' Auxiliary, country club engagements, and art classes. The qualities that she values above all others and seeks to instill in her children are nice manners, pleasant dispositions, and cleanliness. In any and every conversation, she can be counted on to supply vapid filler. And she will go to great lengths to gloss over the earthier things of life, especially with her children. For example, she took them to the wedding of a distant relative, where the bride walked down the aisle obviously pregnant - a circumstance that Mrs. Bridge could not bring herself to remark upon; three months later they received an announcement of the birth of a child, and Mrs. Bridge exclaimed, "Isn't that nice!", and then added for the benefit of her children (ages 14, 16, and 18), "First babies are so often premature." The great achievement of Evan S. Connell in MRS. BRIDGE is to limn such a pathetic existence in such a readable, engaging novel.
The novel spans about 25 years of India Bridge's life, from the time she gets married at age 26 (narrowly escaping, one senses, spinsterhood) to the time her youngest child is going off to war. It is set in an affluent section of Kansas City during the Twenties and Thirties. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are thoroughly imbued with Midwestern Republican values, as are most of the secondary characters, their friends and neighbors. There are a few genuine eccentrics, but no one is particularly notable, much less admirable or heroic.
The story is told in a pointillistic, anecdotal fashion. The writing is spare and straightforward. I am finding it difficult to make the novel sound interesting. Yet it is . . . which is a tribute to the craftsmanship underlying this starkly realistic portrayal of a certain unlamented time and place of American life. Four-and-a-half stars.
P.S.: Evan S. Connell, now 86, is one of the more under-appreciated men of American letters. MRS. BRIDGE was the first of (by my count) seven novels. He also has written short stories, poetry, essays, and book-length works of non-fiction, including the nonpareil "Son of the Morning Star", an extended meditation on Custer at the Little Big Horn and the plowing under of Native Americans.
The novel spans about 25 years of India Bridge's life, from the time she gets married at age 26 (narrowly escaping, one senses, spinsterhood) to the time her youngest child is going off to war. It is set in an affluent section of Kansas City during the Twenties and Thirties. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are thoroughly imbued with Midwestern Republican values, as are most of the secondary characters, their friends and neighbors. There are a few genuine eccentrics, but no one is particularly notable, much less admirable or heroic.
The story is told in a pointillistic, anecdotal fashion. The writing is spare and straightforward. I am finding it difficult to make the novel sound interesting. Yet it is . . . which is a tribute to the craftsmanship underlying this starkly realistic portrayal of a certain unlamented time and place of American life. Four-and-a-half stars.
P.S.: Evan S. Connell, now 86, is one of the more under-appreciated men of American letters. MRS. BRIDGE was the first of (by my count) seven novels. He also has written short stories, poetry, essays, and book-length works of non-fiction, including the nonpareil "Son of the Morning Star", an extended meditation on Custer at the Little Big Horn and the plowing under of Native Americans.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I love the way this book was
written, in little short chapters,
little scenes from Mrs. Bridge's
life. Each little chapter is like
a Zen story, a little piece of a
life that zings the reader like a
tiny dart. Recommended.
written, in little short chapters,
little scenes from Mrs. Bridge's
life. Each little chapter is like
a Zen story, a little piece of a
life that zings the reader like a
tiny dart. Recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is so well written and addresses the problems of most women today, that it came as a great shock to find it was written in 1959!
This is definitely one of my all time favorites and will be handed down to my grandaughter.
This is definitely one of my all time favorites and will be handed down to my grandaughter.
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