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Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge #1
Mrs. Bridge
Best-selling author Evan S. Connell is expert at sketching the banalities and trivialities of middle-class values, customs, and habits. Like Mr. Bridge, its counterpart, Mrs. Bridge is comprised of over one hundred titled chapters, containing vignettes, an image, a fragment of conversation, an event—all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided beneath by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal alienation. With a surgeon’s skill Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development beneath. Mrs. Bridge recedes more and more into doubt and confusion as her three children and husband become more remote and silent. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. A fly caught unawares in amber for eternity is no more immobilized and exposed than Mrs. Bridge, trapped in her garage as her novel ends.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
About the author
Evan S. Connell
39 books144 followersEvan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was a U.S. novelist, poet, and short-story writer. His writing covered a variety of genres, although he published most frequently in fiction.
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,013 reviews
May 25, 2022
A series of vignettes capturing the life of a 1930s housewife-- the well-meaning, bigoted, conservative and largely ignorant Mrs Bridge.
It's a short book written in tiny snapshots, which makes it possible to zoom through quickly. What's odd is that this archetype of the white, suburban housewife, who is fine with black people as long as they don't get so uppity as to move into the neighbourhood, still feels true today. There are still a great many Mrs Bridges wandering around the "nice" American suburbs.
Surprisingly for the time-- and from a male author even more so --Mrs. Bridge really captures the stifling, suffocating and, ultimately, depressing reality of being someone without a job or ambition, who has lived her life solely catering to her husband and children.
What I took from this is that no matter what you do for your children or your spouse, you will eventually be left with yourself... and if that self is an empty shell, devoid of its own purpose or interests, it will be a miserable ending.
It's a short book written in tiny snapshots, which makes it possible to zoom through quickly. What's odd is that this archetype of the white, suburban housewife, who is fine with black people as long as they don't get so uppity as to move into the neighbourhood, still feels true today. There are still a great many Mrs Bridges wandering around the "nice" American suburbs.
Surprisingly for the time-- and from a male author even more so --Mrs. Bridge really captures the stifling, suffocating and, ultimately, depressing reality of being someone without a job or ambition, who has lived her life solely catering to her husband and children.
What I took from this is that no matter what you do for your children or your spouse, you will eventually be left with yourself... and if that self is an empty shell, devoid of its own purpose or interests, it will be a miserable ending.
September 14, 2017
This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and understated character study of a country-club wife in the early 20th century--of a woman dedicated to outward appearances, to decency and propriety, to doing what is expected. And all the while you get the suffocating sense of a person who's becoming more and more lost and empty, trapped in the silences that mark her days. It's told in a series of short chapters--short vignettes, really--and the effect is one that builds layer upon fine layer, like fine brush strokes upon a canvas.
The opening paragraph is a wonderful little example of those small revealing moments that mark this book:
"Her first name was India--she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did."
The opening paragraph is a wonderful little example of those small revealing moments that mark this book:
"Her first name was India--she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did."
September 6, 2020
Upper middle class woman endures, rather than lives life
This reminds me in tone of The Remains of the Day. A woman, named India, an exotic name for an ordinary person, gets married , has three children and watches them grow up. Mrs. Bridge exists in a timeless place it seems. I was shocked when the beginning of World War 2 was mentioned.She loves her children and her husband, but doesn't understand them, especially, the beautiful Ruth, her eldest, and mercurial Douglas, the baby of the family.
Mr. Bridge is sensible and understands and empathize with the children better than his wife, but he is never home. He is always at work, giving them the best life he can, little knowing that it is he they want and miss. The novel is very, very sad, and sometimes absurd, so that I laughed at Mrs. Bridge's preposterous and officious manner. Her conventional behaviour is sometimes hard to bear, but she is human and never a caricature.
Written in small essays, the story is not told, as much as built up in layers, as is life.
This reminds me in tone of The Remains of the Day. A woman, named India, an exotic name for an ordinary person, gets married , has three children and watches them grow up. Mrs. Bridge exists in a timeless place it seems. I was shocked when the beginning of World War 2 was mentioned.She loves her children and her husband, but doesn't understand them, especially, the beautiful Ruth, her eldest, and mercurial Douglas, the baby of the family.
Mr. Bridge is sensible and understands and empathize with the children better than his wife, but he is never home. He is always at work, giving them the best life he can, little knowing that it is he they want and miss. The novel is very, very sad, and sometimes absurd, so that I laughed at Mrs. Bridge's preposterous and officious manner. Her conventional behaviour is sometimes hard to bear, but she is human and never a caricature.
Written in small essays, the story is not told, as much as built up in layers, as is life.
October 18, 2017
Originally published in 1959, this quiet novel is set in Kansas City in the 1930's. The minutiae of everyday life, the ins and outs of the Bridge household, shown in bits and snippets. Mrs. Bridge is vaguely dissatisfied with her life, but can't really put her finger on why. Her husband and three children no longer seem to need her attention. In providing everything for her, it may be that Mr. Bridge has done her no favors. She is at loose ends more often than not.
Finely written, it is subtle, with underlying notes of melancholy. The image of an unfinished book dying on a shelf stays with me.
Finely written, it is subtle, with underlying notes of melancholy. The image of an unfinished book dying on a shelf stays with me.
August 17, 2013
If you’re like me, there may be certain privileged disenchanted types you feel like telling, “Get a real problem!” I thought for a while Mrs. Bridge would qualify for that kind of reproach. She had a comfortable life at a time when many did not, she had few responsibilities, and the status quo, such as she perceived it, suited her fine. Whence the angst, then? Reading on, we see from where very clearly. I was no longer tempted to say her problems weren’t real. Thanks to Connell’s many revealing vignettes, everything about her rang true.
Mrs. Bridge and her husband, a successful lawyer who worked long hours at the office, lived in Kansas City with their two daughters and younger son. The time period covered the twenties up to WWII. During much of this time, of course, the country was in The Great Depression, but you wouldn’t know it by them. Her Lincoln, laundry, kitchen and home were well-tended. At first I viewed her as a kind of numeraire -- a God-fearing Midwestern middlebrow against whom the differing attitudes of the day and quirks of other characters could be measured. Then, as more tiles in the mosaic were put in place (117 short chapters), I found that her own nuanced profile had emerged. It wasn’t always one we could admire, but it was one we could understand. She was a recognizable product of human nature and the times.
There are so many examples of Connell’s brilliant character bites that it’s difficult to come up with a representative few that can illustrate. These tidbits did not constitute a plot, but they were interesting enough in their own right to keep the narrative lively. Characters other than Mrs. Bridge were profiled, too, including her family, servants and friends. We’re reminded of the state of race relations (“knowing one’s place” in essence) and the role of many housewives in the pre-feminist era (deferring to the husband in most every way). Mrs. Bridge was the most fully drawn, of course. (Mr. Bridge got his chance in a follow-up book Connell published 10 years later.) She was
While it was not always easy to like Mrs. Bridge, it was no leap at all to feel sorry for her. As her children grew independent, she had very little to do. Companionship from her husband was minimal. And the purposelessness she felt really stung. To sum it all up, Connell’s last short chapter presented the perfect ending:
Character profiles usually hinge on how well they're crafted. On that count, this one gets top marks. It's subtle, observant and well-written without so much as a whisper to say that upper-class ennui might be boring or twee. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
Mrs. Bridge and her husband, a successful lawyer who worked long hours at the office, lived in Kansas City with their two daughters and younger son. The time period covered the twenties up to WWII. During much of this time, of course, the country was in The Great Depression, but you wouldn’t know it by them. Her Lincoln, laundry, kitchen and home were well-tended. At first I viewed her as a kind of numeraire -- a God-fearing Midwestern middlebrow against whom the differing attitudes of the day and quirks of other characters could be measured. Then, as more tiles in the mosaic were put in place (117 short chapters), I found that her own nuanced profile had emerged. It wasn’t always one we could admire, but it was one we could understand. She was a recognizable product of human nature and the times.
There are so many examples of Connell’s brilliant character bites that it’s difficult to come up with a representative few that can illustrate. These tidbits did not constitute a plot, but they were interesting enough in their own right to keep the narrative lively. Characters other than Mrs. Bridge were profiled, too, including her family, servants and friends. We’re reminded of the state of race relations (“knowing one’s place” in essence) and the role of many housewives in the pre-feminist era (deferring to the husband in most every way). Mrs. Bridge was the most fully drawn, of course. (Mr. Bridge got his chance in a follow-up book Connell published 10 years later.) She was
» not one to speak her mind if it could be construed as poor manners to do so
» a careful student of appearances
» innately suspicious of change
» friends with a woman who liked arts and books, but could never seem to follow through with her own self-improvements (Spanish lessons curtailed after chapter 1, her short-lived political awareness campaign yielded the way to Mr. Bridge’s pronouncements, and books were often abandoned)
» progressively less successful imparting her old values to the new generation of Bridges
While it was not always easy to like Mrs. Bridge, it was no leap at all to feel sorry for her. As her children grew independent, she had very little to do. Companionship from her husband was minimal. And the purposelessness she felt really stung. To sum it all up, Connell’s last short chapter presented the perfect ending:
Character profiles usually hinge on how well they're crafted. On that count, this one gets top marks. It's subtle, observant and well-written without so much as a whisper to say that upper-class ennui might be boring or twee. 4.5 stars rounded to 5.
February 9, 2019
Leí esta novela en una edición que incluía también “Mr. Bridge” y a pesar de que diez años separan la escritura de ambas novelas y aunque las dos poseen entidad propia, recomiendo fervorosamente su lectura conjunta.
El primer aspecto que quiero resaltar es la habilidad del autor para construir un relato de 640 páginas sobre la vida de una normalita familia conservadora americana de los años 30 sin que ello nos resulte aburrido en ningún momento. En la novela no hay grandes acontecimientos, la vida transcurre con normalidad, con los incidentes típicos de una familia en su anodina vida. Sin embargo, toda ella está construida sobre otra novela interior de la que se nos irá alertando con pequeños detalles diseminados por los más de 250 pequeños capítulos en los que se divide. Capítulos estos que podrían ser pequeños relatos precursores del realismo sucio que vendrá después (aunque este no sea sucio en absoluto... aunque... bueno, habrá que leerla para descubrir a qué me refiero con este aunque).
Narrado en tercera persona, la primera parte se centra en la vida de la señora Bridge. El retrato que Connell hace de ella es perfecto. Con una prosa sencilla y a base de pequeñas píldoras, de fragmentos de la vida de esta mujer y de su familia, el autor nos va mostrando la profunda soledad e insatisfacción que padece esta mujer débil, inocente hasta la bobería, infeliz, sin reconocerlo, en la vida que ella misma ha elegido. Una mujer incapaz de rebelarse ante nada, que espera a saber las opiniones ajenas antes de atreverse a dar la suya, que nunca es tajante, que solo busca impedir la confrontación. Racista, clasista sin saber que lo es o, mejor aún, sin pararse a pensar si lo es; madre amantísima de unos hijos que van creciendo y apartándose de ella, y casada con un hombre absorto en su trabajo y del que en realidad no sabe nada, que no muestra ningún sentimiento hacia ella y que sin embargo...
Por su parte, Mr. Bridge es un rígido conservador de la América profunda, homófobo, racista, machista, intransigente. De una sola pieza... o eso quiere hacernos creer. Aunque su personalidad tenga muchos menos recovecos que la de su mujer, también aquí iremos leyendo esa novela subterránea construida en base a pequeños detalles que nos irán ofreciendo aspectos de otra persona que emerge en contadas ocasiones y que nos irán descubriendo su conciencia de la insustancialidad de su vida. Una vida que, como la de su mujer, es la que siempre ha querido vivir, de la que se siente orgulloso.
Ambas partes se complementan a la perfección para ofrecernos el retrato de esa familia de clase media en la que no todo es lo que parece, ni siquiera para los que la integran. Altamente recomendable.
April 5, 2022
This is absolutely the funniest book I have read in ages! The humor lies primarily in the prose, but what the characters do is funny too. The humor is satirical, but never nasty.
The characters are kind, and yet at the same time they remain absolutely real. To be able to draw characters that readers will like and are true to life takes talent. Keep in mind though, that nice people are not spared life’s difficulties.
The ending is utterly superb. It will surprise you too. How in the world did the author think up this?! I was completely caught off guard. A message is conveyed that speaks volumes.
The author’s words are sparse. The text is not wordy. Each word is perfect and absolutely right. Both what the characters say and what they do are pitch perfect. If you appreciate realism, this is a book for you!
There are many, many short chapters. Each chapter makes a statement, and each chapter flows fluidly into the next. The effect is a string of clever statements, one after the other. They flow together and give you a story. Then, you reach the end and the message smacks you in the face. I am trying to describe the flow, the feel of the story. It is not ordinary. It is different. It is unique. There is not a hint of melodrama.
Maybe, just maybe, this book will speak first and foremost to baby boomers. Do you remember expressions such as these?
* "And your father is going to hear about this!"
* "I gotta express my personality."
* "I am at the end of my rope."
* "And that is final. I mean business!"
* "I have only a split second."
Wait till you meet Grace Baron who reflects and then says, "The orbit is so small." You must read the book to discover her fate and what happens to India and Walter Bridge and their three children Ruth, Caroline and Douglas. Those searching for books that mirror how kids behave will love this book.
Sally Darling narrates the audiobook version. Her narration cannot be given anything but five stars. It is perfect, stunning, fabulous. She reads slowly, pausing, letting you know that what is said has two meanings and the important one is the one implied. She is saying, pay attention, don’t miss the humor, don’t miss the significance of what is said! She uses different intonations for different characters. Each intonation captures perfectly that person’s personality. If you ever listen to audiobooks, listen to this. Don’t read it.
In 1969 Mr. Bridge was published, a decade after Mrs. Bridge. In both books we follow the two Bridges and their three kids. This is an upper-middle class family living in Kansas City during the 1930s and through the war. He is lawyer, she is a stay at home mom. We watch the kids grow up and we observe the change in family dynamics as the years pass. In the first book we see these years through her eyes and in the second through his. Mrs. Bridge is not a book about the war years. It is a book about family and being a mom and raising kids and finding a place in the world when the kids have gone.
I threw away all my reading plans. The minute I completed Mrs. Bridge, I had to immediately begin Mr. Bridge. This is not normal behavior for me and it shows you how much I enjoyed this book. Now I am wondering, will Mr. Bridge be as good?
*********************
*Mrs. Bridge 5 stars
*Mr. Bridge 4 stars
*Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn 4 stars
*The Connoisseur TBR
The characters are kind, and yet at the same time they remain absolutely real. To be able to draw characters that readers will like and are true to life takes talent. Keep in mind though, that nice people are not spared life’s difficulties.
The ending is utterly superb. It will surprise you too. How in the world did the author think up this?! I was completely caught off guard. A message is conveyed that speaks volumes.
The author’s words are sparse. The text is not wordy. Each word is perfect and absolutely right. Both what the characters say and what they do are pitch perfect. If you appreciate realism, this is a book for you!
There are many, many short chapters. Each chapter makes a statement, and each chapter flows fluidly into the next. The effect is a string of clever statements, one after the other. They flow together and give you a story. Then, you reach the end and the message smacks you in the face. I am trying to describe the flow, the feel of the story. It is not ordinary. It is different. It is unique. There is not a hint of melodrama.
Maybe, just maybe, this book will speak first and foremost to baby boomers. Do you remember expressions such as these?
* "And your father is going to hear about this!"
* "I gotta express my personality."
* "I am at the end of my rope."
* "And that is final. I mean business!"
* "I have only a split second."
Wait till you meet Grace Baron who reflects and then says, "The orbit is so small." You must read the book to discover her fate and what happens to India and Walter Bridge and their three children Ruth, Caroline and Douglas. Those searching for books that mirror how kids behave will love this book.
Sally Darling narrates the audiobook version. Her narration cannot be given anything but five stars. It is perfect, stunning, fabulous. She reads slowly, pausing, letting you know that what is said has two meanings and the important one is the one implied. She is saying, pay attention, don’t miss the humor, don’t miss the significance of what is said! She uses different intonations for different characters. Each intonation captures perfectly that person’s personality. If you ever listen to audiobooks, listen to this. Don’t read it.
In 1969 Mr. Bridge was published, a decade after Mrs. Bridge. In both books we follow the two Bridges and their three kids. This is an upper-middle class family living in Kansas City during the 1930s and through the war. He is lawyer, she is a stay at home mom. We watch the kids grow up and we observe the change in family dynamics as the years pass. In the first book we see these years through her eyes and in the second through his. Mrs. Bridge is not a book about the war years. It is a book about family and being a mom and raising kids and finding a place in the world when the kids have gone.
I threw away all my reading plans. The minute I completed Mrs. Bridge, I had to immediately begin Mr. Bridge. This is not normal behavior for me and it shows you how much I enjoyed this book. Now I am wondering, will Mr. Bridge be as good?
*********************
*Mrs. Bridge 5 stars
*Mr. Bridge 4 stars
*Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn 4 stars
*The Connoisseur TBR
April 5, 2022
5★
“Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.”
That last phrase sums up her story, that she was often on the point of something, but time passed and something else intervened.
India Bridge was what might now be called a whitebread girl, raised in the American Midwest in Kansas after WWI. She didn’t think she’d bother to get married, but lawyer Walter Bridge called on her often, telling her his dream to take his wife “whenever I finally decide to marry” on a tour of Europe. He persisted until he convinced her to accept him.
“She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way—because she willed it to be so—her wants and her expectations were the same.”
This is a touching portrait – both sad and funny – the kind of story that may make you burst out laughing at her but then realise that all Mrs. Bridge knows is what she was taught – ‘proper’ behaviour. She has internalised a handbook of appropriate behaviour, so if she follows the rules, life will turn out just fine, which is probably why she married, because it was expected of her.
Written in 1959, this takes place mostly between the two World Wars. Many people born post WWII would know or have been raised by mothers like Mrs. Bridge - women who had been told how to deal with servants, tradespeople, business people, and their own, middle-upper or upper social class.
Life for them was just about as cut and dried as the Indian caste system or medieval society with nobles and peasants. It was only one step removed from America’s colonial past and slavery. But life doesn’t always follow the rules. There is a kind of underlying terror to her days. She keeps waiting for something, anything. The book opens with a Walt Whitman quotation:
“But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?”
She is stuck in a time-warp, with a pre-war set of already outdated social standards, and she's just aware enough to feel uncomfortable and itchy, but far too timid to do anything about it, fearful that she will annoy her husband and embarrass herself. She envies but worries about her friend Grace Barron, who wears different clothes and rails loudly against discrimination and the poor treatment of Native Americans.
Mostly, I cringed a lot, hearing echoes of my childhood and feeling again my own discomfort when in a situation where I don’t know what the “appropriate behaviour” is. I grew up in the American Midwest, but I left before I learned how to tip, for example. As a result, when I used to travel to visit the US, I tended to hang onto my own bag because I wasn’t sure what to do.
Mr. Bridge is a strong background figure (a wait-till-your-father-gets-home sort of fellow who always knows how to tip), and a man who believed the longer he worked, the better he was providing for his family. He is a man who takes care of everything. He gives her amazing birthday presents, one of which is an enormous Lincoln (car) that she can’t park.
Her children, of course, are another generation entirely and considerably more free-wheeling than their parents. There are two girls, whom she understands a bit, and a lively little boy, whom she doesn’t understand at all. Why, oh why, did Douglas use the guest towel in the bathroom when they had company over? Oh, the horror of it all!
“They were quite small, not much larger than a handkerchief, and no one ever touched them. After the visitors had gone home she would carefully lift them from the rack and replace them in the box till next time. Nobody touched them because they looked too nice; guests always did as she herself did in their homes—she would dry her hands on a piece of Kleenex.”
I remember guest towels well, and I bet I have some somewhere (in a box!) that I never knew what to do with. But Mrs. Bridge hid all the real towels, so what’s a poor boy to do?
She butts heads with teenaged Ruth over her not carrying a purse when going out.
“Ruth was still admiring herself in the mirror.
‘I shouldn't think you could carry much in those pockets.’
Ruth stepped backward, narrowed her eyes, and unfastened the top button of her blouse.
‘Really, you need some things,’ Mrs. Bridge remarked a trifle sharply. ‘And button yourself up, for goodness sake. You look like a chorus girl."
‘Good night,’ said Ruth flatly and started for the door.
But, dear, a lady always carries a purse!’ Mrs. Bridge was saying when the door closed.”
She misses the early closeness with Mr. Bridge and realises he will always spend more time at the office and in his study than with her.
“They had started off together to explore something that promised to be wonderful, and, of course, there had been wonderful times. And yet, thought Mrs. Bridge, why is it that we haven't—that nothing has—that whatever we—?”
She has a full-time housekeeper who cooks and cleans (and comes in the back door with the tradespeople). Mrs. Bridge is a lady of leisure, desperate for validation, or at least for someone to spend time with. It’s the maid’s day off, so with nobody to talk to, she calls a friend who comes for coffee and they decide to have a snack, which they will have to fix themselves.
"‘Strawberries and whipped cream?’she suggested. ‘These are frozen, of course. They don't really taste the same as the fresh, but they certainly are a time-saver.’"
Oh, the irony! The whole book is full of these gems that you may not even notice. Mrs. Bridge certainly doesn’t, at least not outwardly. Inwardly, she is still feeling she’s missed something, but she doesn’t quite know what it is. [She could start by planting strawberries!]
I can’t wait to read Mr. Bridge now. I have seen it said that the author based Mrs. Bridge on his mother. I would recognise her a mile away! Wonderful story.
[P.S. I have now read and enjoyed Mr Bridge - here's my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
“Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.”
That last phrase sums up her story, that she was often on the point of something, but time passed and something else intervened.
India Bridge was what might now be called a whitebread girl, raised in the American Midwest in Kansas after WWI. She didn’t think she’d bother to get married, but lawyer Walter Bridge called on her often, telling her his dream to take his wife “whenever I finally decide to marry” on a tour of Europe. He persisted until he convinced her to accept him.
“She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way—because she willed it to be so—her wants and her expectations were the same.”
This is a touching portrait – both sad and funny – the kind of story that may make you burst out laughing at her but then realise that all Mrs. Bridge knows is what she was taught – ‘proper’ behaviour. She has internalised a handbook of appropriate behaviour, so if she follows the rules, life will turn out just fine, which is probably why she married, because it was expected of her.
Written in 1959, this takes place mostly between the two World Wars. Many people born post WWII would know or have been raised by mothers like Mrs. Bridge - women who had been told how to deal with servants, tradespeople, business people, and their own, middle-upper or upper social class.
Life for them was just about as cut and dried as the Indian caste system or medieval society with nobles and peasants. It was only one step removed from America’s colonial past and slavery. But life doesn’t always follow the rules. There is a kind of underlying terror to her days. She keeps waiting for something, anything. The book opens with a Walt Whitman quotation:
“But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?”
She is stuck in a time-warp, with a pre-war set of already outdated social standards, and she's just aware enough to feel uncomfortable and itchy, but far too timid to do anything about it, fearful that she will annoy her husband and embarrass herself. She envies but worries about her friend Grace Barron, who wears different clothes and rails loudly against discrimination and the poor treatment of Native Americans.
Mostly, I cringed a lot, hearing echoes of my childhood and feeling again my own discomfort when in a situation where I don’t know what the “appropriate behaviour” is. I grew up in the American Midwest, but I left before I learned how to tip, for example. As a result, when I used to travel to visit the US, I tended to hang onto my own bag because I wasn’t sure what to do.
Mr. Bridge is a strong background figure (a wait-till-your-father-gets-home sort of fellow who always knows how to tip), and a man who believed the longer he worked, the better he was providing for his family. He is a man who takes care of everything. He gives her amazing birthday presents, one of which is an enormous Lincoln (car) that she can’t park.
Her children, of course, are another generation entirely and considerably more free-wheeling than their parents. There are two girls, whom she understands a bit, and a lively little boy, whom she doesn’t understand at all. Why, oh why, did Douglas use the guest towel in the bathroom when they had company over? Oh, the horror of it all!
“They were quite small, not much larger than a handkerchief, and no one ever touched them. After the visitors had gone home she would carefully lift them from the rack and replace them in the box till next time. Nobody touched them because they looked too nice; guests always did as she herself did in their homes—she would dry her hands on a piece of Kleenex.”
I remember guest towels well, and I bet I have some somewhere (in a box!) that I never knew what to do with. But Mrs. Bridge hid all the real towels, so what’s a poor boy to do?
She butts heads with teenaged Ruth over her not carrying a purse when going out.
“Ruth was still admiring herself in the mirror.
‘I shouldn't think you could carry much in those pockets.’
Ruth stepped backward, narrowed her eyes, and unfastened the top button of her blouse.
‘Really, you need some things,’ Mrs. Bridge remarked a trifle sharply. ‘And button yourself up, for goodness sake. You look like a chorus girl."
‘Good night,’ said Ruth flatly and started for the door.
But, dear, a lady always carries a purse!’ Mrs. Bridge was saying when the door closed.”
She misses the early closeness with Mr. Bridge and realises he will always spend more time at the office and in his study than with her.
“They had started off together to explore something that promised to be wonderful, and, of course, there had been wonderful times. And yet, thought Mrs. Bridge, why is it that we haven't—that nothing has—that whatever we—?”
She has a full-time housekeeper who cooks and cleans (and comes in the back door with the tradespeople). Mrs. Bridge is a lady of leisure, desperate for validation, or at least for someone to spend time with. It’s the maid’s day off, so with nobody to talk to, she calls a friend who comes for coffee and they decide to have a snack, which they will have to fix themselves.
"‘Strawberries and whipped cream?’she suggested. ‘These are frozen, of course. They don't really taste the same as the fresh, but they certainly are a time-saver.’"
Oh, the irony! The whole book is full of these gems that you may not even notice. Mrs. Bridge certainly doesn’t, at least not outwardly. Inwardly, she is still feeling she’s missed something, but she doesn’t quite know what it is. [She could start by planting strawberries!]
I can’t wait to read Mr. Bridge now. I have seen it said that the author based Mrs. Bridge on his mother. I would recognise her a mile away! Wonderful story.
[P.S. I have now read and enjoyed Mr Bridge - here's my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
April 5, 2013
A quietly devastating portrayal of a housewife shorn of all personality or free will, raising her typical kids in a typical Midwestern breadbasket under the aegis of her all-powerful husband (who has a sequel in which to express his own typicality). The effect is similar to the poetic melodrama of The Book of Disquiet, but with a more lightly mocking and tender-heartedly sympathetic tone, and less insufferable moaning posing as philosophical profundity. In under 200 canny pages this novel slowly disassembles the American Dream and blasts the capitalist utopia into smithereens with achingly lovely paragraphs of emptiness, loneliness and trivial domestic matters. At times unbearably sad and poignant. As friend Grace Barron ably sums up: “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairytale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?” (p176)
September 17, 2021
Interesting format. Book is told in 117 chapters or actually vignettes. Most in my paperback edition were 1-4 pages. Most of the story takes place in the late 1930s pre-World War II in Kansas City. Mrs. Bridge is married to Mr. Bridge…he is a lawyer, and they live in the very fashionable part of town. She belongs to women’s clubs and is a woman of leisure and has a lot of time on her hands, even with her three kids.
She and her husband are through and through White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They are prejudiced towards blacks and Italians.
It was hard for me to like Mrs. Bridge. Her husband was faithful to her, but he showed very little love towards her, and was rarely home. He was a workaholic. She had next-to-no interests. She took Spanish classes (she listened to phonograph records of Spanish people talking) and she dropped that. She dropped painting. She didn’t read. But she had a Lincoln and furs, so that should have made her happy. And apparently it did at times, but at other times she was bored. I suppose in that time period she did not have many options. She was expected to behave in a certain way (mores and social customs and conformity) and that she did, but it was no guarantee of feeling fulfilled.
Some parts of the novel were humorous. Other parts just made me uncomfortable, but I think that was the point of the author. Ten years after writing this book, he wrote a companion piece, ‘Mr. Bridge’, and I will be reading that soon, before I forget about the content of this book (my memory is a sieve).
Here are a couple of funny parts:
(She buys her son, Douglas, a suit and he hates it. On the way home when he is wearing it, he says it feels so heavy on him he is going to have a heart attack. He’s only 10 so that is unlikely to happen.)
“Well, it is (going to cause me to have a heart attack) he said, and began to stagger and clutch his chest. “It’s too heavy. I can’t breathe.”
“The only thing with you, my young friend, is your big imagination.”
“Okay, then,” he retorted gloomily. And with his head lowered he walked slowly away. Stopping every few steps to feel his heart. At the door he hesitated, and before going out he said truculently, “But I’m telling you, if I keel over dead, don’t be surprised.”
“Very well,” she replied. “I won’t.”
(She has a friend Grace Barron who, unlike her, is a liberal and outspoken and does not toe the party line.)
Her entire attitude toward religion was flippant, and Mrs. Bridge did not think it was in very good taste. After one of the Auxiliary meetings she chanced to be nearby when Grace got on the subject of religion and said there was a rumor that after Christ was sentenced to death He turned to one of the soldiers and said, “When am I going to learn to keep my big mouth shut?”
Mrs. Bridge smiled courteously, as she never failed to do when someone told a joke, and although she did not believe God was planning to strike Grace dead, still she could not see there was anything to be gained by asking for trouble. 😂
Reviews (all reviews are effusive…most all of them call this a lost classic...please consider putting this on your TBR list! 😊):
• This is written by the novelist Meg Wolitzer and is interesting/excellent: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/bo...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• one helluva review: https://lithub.com/mrs-bridge-is-a-pe...
She and her husband are through and through White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They are prejudiced towards blacks and Italians.
It was hard for me to like Mrs. Bridge. Her husband was faithful to her, but he showed very little love towards her, and was rarely home. He was a workaholic. She had next-to-no interests. She took Spanish classes (she listened to phonograph records of Spanish people talking) and she dropped that. She dropped painting. She didn’t read. But she had a Lincoln and furs, so that should have made her happy. And apparently it did at times, but at other times she was bored. I suppose in that time period she did not have many options. She was expected to behave in a certain way (mores and social customs and conformity) and that she did, but it was no guarantee of feeling fulfilled.
Some parts of the novel were humorous. Other parts just made me uncomfortable, but I think that was the point of the author. Ten years after writing this book, he wrote a companion piece, ‘Mr. Bridge’, and I will be reading that soon, before I forget about the content of this book (my memory is a sieve).
Here are a couple of funny parts:
(She buys her son, Douglas, a suit and he hates it. On the way home when he is wearing it, he says it feels so heavy on him he is going to have a heart attack. He’s only 10 so that is unlikely to happen.)
“Well, it is (going to cause me to have a heart attack) he said, and began to stagger and clutch his chest. “It’s too heavy. I can’t breathe.”
“The only thing with you, my young friend, is your big imagination.”
“Okay, then,” he retorted gloomily. And with his head lowered he walked slowly away. Stopping every few steps to feel his heart. At the door he hesitated, and before going out he said truculently, “But I’m telling you, if I keel over dead, don’t be surprised.”
“Very well,” she replied. “I won’t.”
(She has a friend Grace Barron who, unlike her, is a liberal and outspoken and does not toe the party line.)
Her entire attitude toward religion was flippant, and Mrs. Bridge did not think it was in very good taste. After one of the Auxiliary meetings she chanced to be nearby when Grace got on the subject of religion and said there was a rumor that after Christ was sentenced to death He turned to one of the soldiers and said, “When am I going to learn to keep my big mouth shut?”
Mrs. Bridge smiled courteously, as she never failed to do when someone told a joke, and although she did not believe God was planning to strike Grace dead, still she could not see there was anything to be gained by asking for trouble. 😂
Reviews (all reviews are effusive…most all of them call this a lost classic...please consider putting this on your TBR list! 😊):
• This is written by the novelist Meg Wolitzer and is interesting/excellent: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/bo...
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• one helluva review: https://lithub.com/mrs-bridge-is-a-pe...
November 6, 2014
What a patient and subtle novel! Mrs. Bridge, portrait of an upper-middle class matron in 1920s-30s-40s Kansas City, would be less effective if Connell’s satirical sense were cartoonish or caricatural, or if he had chosen to distance himself from the milieu of his own childhood with rounds of wordy denunciation. It is easy to caricature those who strive to be unerringly conventional--absolutely, unthreateningly recognizable to whatever peers they’re set among--as edgeless and dull, with a vast unquestioning silence where a self should be. Connell shows us how such people are actually the opposite of placidly dull. In fact with a little quiet attention, and some graceful empathy, their inner lives soon reveal anxiety and torment, jagged emotions of loneliness and deprivation, consciousness crazed by fear of standing out in a negative way.
Connell traces Mrs. Bridge’s ingratiating gestures and careful clichés back to their turbid source: the need to conceal the sexual frustration and loneliness of her merely ceremonial marriage. Every aspect of boring propriety, every blandly genteel touch--at a certain age a boy must begin to wear a homburg, young ladies must never go out without a purse--Connell shows to be dictated by a complex machinery of calculation, a desperate vigilance over appearances. We all know a Mrs. Bridge: agreeable and sociably smooth with strangers and acquaintances (her husband numbers among those), but a nagging burden to intimates, especially to his or her children, the class implications of whose presentation and deportment provokes an untiring, inescapable fussing. She’s the kind of parent from whom the least adventurous child must hide its life.
Connell’s is the best anatomy of I know of the deathliness of the middlebrow, and of the poverty of affluent people who lack for nothing except a sharable, cultural language for difficult experience. Mrs. Bridge’s everything-is-just-perfect respectability denies her emotional complexity, and it denies the body without even the facilely antithetical pretense of exalting the mind. She occupies a decorous, euphemistic, airlessly artificial state from which both intellectuality and sensuality are barred. Her state makes me think of the Americans disassociated from the earthy peasant traditions and meaningful religious practices of immigrant ancestors by the upward mobility of their anxiously assimilative, suburbanite parents or grandparents, while at the same time having little access to the sensual and emotional wisdom to be found in the art-forms the mainstream routinely ghettoizes with the daunting label “high culture.”
Mrs. Bridge’s more spirited children Ruth and Douglas rebel by seeking out exotically (and to their mother, odorously) ethnic lovers; even the conformist Carolyn marries “beneath her.” The Bridge children are the very type of contemporary Americans who whine about “not having a culture”--and they’re absolutely right. Or say, they have a culture, but it’s not one you can live in. None of the things Mrs. Bridge wishes to ritually pass down to her children is at all sustaining or nutritive, none of it says anything honest or memorable about our emotions, our minds, our bodies. Ruth and Douglas flee from her because she has nothing to give, because when she talks to them about life she lies. The tragedy of the book is that she loves them so deeply but earns their distrust by always pretending they’re still little children who can be fooled. In a wonderful vignette, Mrs. Bridge wants to put together and hand down to her kids albums made up of clippings of the short philosophical quotations that appear in the local society paper. She finally abandons the plan when one of the usually affirmative and cheery maxims turns out to contain the difficult humane substance she habitually shuns:
Mrs. Bridge, being considerably interested in these maxims, had at one point thought of beginning a nice scrapbook with the idea of handing it on to the children. Though she had not found time for this she continued to try to memorize certain quotations, despite the fact that there never seemed to be an appropriate occasion to re-quote them. A line from Montaigne set her to thinking:
"I have always observed a singular accord between super-celestial ideas and subterranean behavior."
In less crystalline style she had observed somewhat the same thing and was puzzled by it: she recalled the strange case of Dr. Foster, who had been positively identified at the burlesque, not once--which could have been attributed to his gathering material for a sermon--but several times. Furthermore he never mentioned it.
Over the wisdom of Montaigne she brooded, eventually reaching the conclusion that if super-celestial ideas were necessarily accompanied by subterranean behavior it might be better to forego them both.
Foregoing those, what are you left with? Dainty hand towels no one dries hands on.
Connell traces Mrs. Bridge’s ingratiating gestures and careful clichés back to their turbid source: the need to conceal the sexual frustration and loneliness of her merely ceremonial marriage. Every aspect of boring propriety, every blandly genteel touch--at a certain age a boy must begin to wear a homburg, young ladies must never go out without a purse--Connell shows to be dictated by a complex machinery of calculation, a desperate vigilance over appearances. We all know a Mrs. Bridge: agreeable and sociably smooth with strangers and acquaintances (her husband numbers among those), but a nagging burden to intimates, especially to his or her children, the class implications of whose presentation and deportment provokes an untiring, inescapable fussing. She’s the kind of parent from whom the least adventurous child must hide its life.
Connell’s is the best anatomy of I know of the deathliness of the middlebrow, and of the poverty of affluent people who lack for nothing except a sharable, cultural language for difficult experience. Mrs. Bridge’s everything-is-just-perfect respectability denies her emotional complexity, and it denies the body without even the facilely antithetical pretense of exalting the mind. She occupies a decorous, euphemistic, airlessly artificial state from which both intellectuality and sensuality are barred. Her state makes me think of the Americans disassociated from the earthy peasant traditions and meaningful religious practices of immigrant ancestors by the upward mobility of their anxiously assimilative, suburbanite parents or grandparents, while at the same time having little access to the sensual and emotional wisdom to be found in the art-forms the mainstream routinely ghettoizes with the daunting label “high culture.”
Mrs. Bridge’s more spirited children Ruth and Douglas rebel by seeking out exotically (and to their mother, odorously) ethnic lovers; even the conformist Carolyn marries “beneath her.” The Bridge children are the very type of contemporary Americans who whine about “not having a culture”--and they’re absolutely right. Or say, they have a culture, but it’s not one you can live in. None of the things Mrs. Bridge wishes to ritually pass down to her children is at all sustaining or nutritive, none of it says anything honest or memorable about our emotions, our minds, our bodies. Ruth and Douglas flee from her because she has nothing to give, because when she talks to them about life she lies. The tragedy of the book is that she loves them so deeply but earns their distrust by always pretending they’re still little children who can be fooled. In a wonderful vignette, Mrs. Bridge wants to put together and hand down to her kids albums made up of clippings of the short philosophical quotations that appear in the local society paper. She finally abandons the plan when one of the usually affirmative and cheery maxims turns out to contain the difficult humane substance she habitually shuns:
Mrs. Bridge, being considerably interested in these maxims, had at one point thought of beginning a nice scrapbook with the idea of handing it on to the children. Though she had not found time for this she continued to try to memorize certain quotations, despite the fact that there never seemed to be an appropriate occasion to re-quote them. A line from Montaigne set her to thinking:
"I have always observed a singular accord between super-celestial ideas and subterranean behavior."
In less crystalline style she had observed somewhat the same thing and was puzzled by it: she recalled the strange case of Dr. Foster, who had been positively identified at the burlesque, not once--which could have been attributed to his gathering material for a sermon--but several times. Furthermore he never mentioned it.
Over the wisdom of Montaigne she brooded, eventually reaching the conclusion that if super-celestial ideas were necessarily accompanied by subterranean behavior it might be better to forego them both.
Foregoing those, what are you left with? Dainty hand towels no one dries hands on.
August 29, 2021
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE 1960
You have to put yourself in 1950’s USA to enjoy this classic. Many of what Mrs. Bridge says and does wouldn’t sit right with the women of today…nor should it. However, those were the times. Sometimes funny and at other times sad, this audiobook turned out to be a delight. A real snapshot of what an upper middle-class, married, woman was like in those days, and the insignificant importance placed on the mundane.
This turned out to be a terrific discussion book for our Bookclub. We decided afterwards to add the author’s MR. BRIDGE to our reading list to see his wife and family through his eyes.
5 out of 5 stars
You have to put yourself in 1950’s USA to enjoy this classic. Many of what Mrs. Bridge says and does wouldn’t sit right with the women of today…nor should it. However, those were the times. Sometimes funny and at other times sad, this audiobook turned out to be a delight. A real snapshot of what an upper middle-class, married, woman was like in those days, and the insignificant importance placed on the mundane.
This turned out to be a terrific discussion book for our Bookclub. We decided afterwards to add the author’s MR. BRIDGE to our reading list to see his wife and family through his eyes.
5 out of 5 stars
August 29, 2017
Un opprimente senso di attesa
All'inizio della tua vita qualcuno ti dà un nome. Poi qualcuno ti iscrive a una scuola. Poi all'età giusta una persona che ha caratteristiche giuste ti sposa; perché fanno tutti così ed è giusto che anche tu lo faccia. Vai a vivere in un luogo che altri hanno deciso e lì incontri amiche che frequentano tutte lo stesso ambiente.
Fai tre figli, che accudisci con molta attenzione, ricambiata poco o niente; hai anche spesso la sensazione che loro ti ritengano un peso, ti ritengano di troppo. Accudisci il marito, che però vive principalmente del suo lavoro passando la maggior parte del proprio tempo fuori casa.
Quando ti verrebbe voglia di fare qualche cosa per te, c'è sempre qualcos'altro più importante: incombenze, dettagli e commissioni che non lasciano spazio ad altro.
Ti conformi al modo generale di pensare.
Ma il tempo passa, i capelli ingrigiscono e impercettibilmente si inizia a fare strada nella tua mente una insoddisfazione, una sensazione di vuoto, di solitudine.
La storia di Mrs Bridge raccontata da questo romanzo pare grigia, ma ha dentro di sé una potenza inaudita. Non servono colpi di scena o tragedie eclatanti o suicidi o lanci di piatti per essere efficaci.
Qui tutto è nascosto, è sotterraneo. Un grigiore che pagina dopo pagina diventa sempre più pesante, un vuoto che mina le fondamenta su cui si basa la vita di questa donna e, probabilmente, di molte donne. E, perché no, anche di molti uomini, con qualche variazione.
Cosa ci serve per essere felici? A cosa aspiriamo? Possiamo avere tutto e ritenerci profondamente insoddisfatti? Come fare per non arrivare alla fine dei nostri giorni dicendo "tutto qui?" "Cosa avrei potuto fare di diverso?" "Ho vissuto?"
Inizia in sordina questo romanzo, quasi intrattenimento leggero, ma progressivamente si trasforma in ansia, in disagio, in dolore sussurrato, in dramma interiore. Per arrivare a un finale che definirei decisamente un capolavoro.
E noi? Siamo sicuri di non somigliare a Mrs. Bridge?
January 26, 2020
This time around I am struck by the fact that the archetype of 1930s intellectually incurious wealthy housewife captured by Connell remains strong now. A woman who is perfectly nice to people of color of poor or foreigners, as long as they know their place. Who will occasionally read a book club novel, as long as it is not too upsetting. Whose life is guided by the decisions of her husband, always.
Another thing that never seems to change is how kids are crap to their parents when they are teenagers. We always hear how "in olden days young people respected their elders." Clearly, a lie.
_________________
This is why I have a job and read books. Being buried in and fixated on domesticity and propriety is just so damn soul-killing. I could have never made it as a 1930s housewife.
I wonder what Mr. Bridge is like.
Another thing that never seems to change is how kids are crap to their parents when they are teenagers. We always hear how "in olden days young people respected their elders." Clearly, a lie.
_________________
This is why I have a job and read books. Being buried in and fixated on domesticity and propriety is just so damn soul-killing. I could have never made it as a 1930s housewife.
I wonder what Mr. Bridge is like.
September 6, 2020
Initially, this novel frustrated me. I wanted Mrs. Bridge to be less narrow-minded, less meek, less prejudiced and less of a snob. I wanted her to wake up and take control of her life.
But once I accepted that this novel is not about an awakening, but a brilliant rendition of Mrs. Bridge dealing with her daily life, I truly appreciated it. I admire what Connell accomplished. And I even sympathize, just a little, with Mrs. Bridge.
But once I accepted that this novel is not about an awakening, but a brilliant rendition of Mrs. Bridge dealing with her daily life, I truly appreciated it. I admire what Connell accomplished. And I even sympathize, just a little, with Mrs. Bridge.
March 20, 2012
I can't for the life of me figure out what makes this novel so great, but damn it is great. I wish I knew why.
You might protest and cry, "Oh but I have already read so many novels about repressed twentieth-century housewives!" But that is like being offered a plate of chocolate chip cookies and saying, "No thank you. I've tried those before."
Chocolate chip cookies are delicious and aren't less so for being frequently baked. And anyway, you haven't had a cookie quite like this one before.
Told in a series of 117 titled vignettes, Mrs. Bridge is the story of an affluent woman living in 1930s-ish Kansas City. In a weird way what it reminded me of was Less Than Zero, just in the sense that yes, rich housewives are easy targets in the same way that stoned spoiled LA teenagers are. But both books, for me, really start when you realize that they're not just talking about their subjects, and that what you thought was the floor is actually a flimsy false bottom covering that yawning abyss on the brink of which we all cravenly teeter.
The difference, of course, is that this is an infinitely better book by an immensely gifted writer who possesses heart, nerve, and brains. Really curious to read more by Evan S. Connell; looks like he's written a bunch of crazy looking shit since this came out in the fifties, and still at it! Not sure if I'm as interested in Mr. Bridge as some of his more different stuff. Any thoughts from those who know? The Custer book looks pretty cool...
You might protest and cry, "Oh but I have already read so many novels about repressed twentieth-century housewives!" But that is like being offered a plate of chocolate chip cookies and saying, "No thank you. I've tried those before."
Chocolate chip cookies are delicious and aren't less so for being frequently baked. And anyway, you haven't had a cookie quite like this one before.
Told in a series of 117 titled vignettes, Mrs. Bridge is the story of an affluent woman living in 1930s-ish Kansas City. In a weird way what it reminded me of was Less Than Zero, just in the sense that yes, rich housewives are easy targets in the same way that stoned spoiled LA teenagers are. But both books, for me, really start when you realize that they're not just talking about their subjects, and that what you thought was the floor is actually a flimsy false bottom covering that yawning abyss on the brink of which we all cravenly teeter.
The difference, of course, is that this is an infinitely better book by an immensely gifted writer who possesses heart, nerve, and brains. Really curious to read more by Evan S. Connell; looks like he's written a bunch of crazy looking shit since this came out in the fifties, and still at it! Not sure if I'm as interested in Mr. Bridge as some of his more different stuff. Any thoughts from those who know? The Custer book looks pretty cool...
January 12, 2018
“C’è qualcuno là fuori?"
Profondo è il senso di solitudine e d'impotenza dinanzi alla ineluttabilità del tempo che trasmette la storia di Mrs Bridge. Una storia, in verità, di ordinaria quotidianità, una come tante, ben lontana dai clamori e dai colpi di scena eclatanti. Senza infamia e senza lode, potremmo forse aggiungere.
Pubblicato negli Stati Uniti alla fine degli anni Cinquanta, il libro racconta, sullo sfondo dell’America dei decenni precedenti, la vicenda di una donna che da figlia diventa moglie e madre seguendo i normali e prevedibili percorsi della vita. Una grande casa, un marito avvocato per lo più assente e tre figli a cui consacrare, con amore e forte senso del dovere, ogni singolo istante delle proprie giornate sempre così piene, ma in realtà vuote di qualcosa difficile da spiegare. Così trascorrono gli anni, all’inizio lenti, poi via via sempre più impietosi, senza che lei riesca per davvero a trovare tempo per se stessa; non bastano i cocktail e feste varie, gli incontri con le amiche, le attività nel sociale a dare un senso al quotidiano vivere; e l’incosciente consapevolezza di appartenere a quella categoria di persone che esistono senza aver vissuto (“ignare fino all’ultimo della vita”) si rivelerà infine un peso decisamente opprimente da sopportare. È vero: di una donna come questa potremmo essere figli, così come in ogni giovane donna c’è una potenziale signora Bridge.
Quest’opera di Evan S. Connell è un buon romanzo dallo stile narrativo semplice e dal contenuto denso di significato. Il mio giudizio complessivo è di tre stelle e ½, poiché diversi capitoli risultano forse troppo lenti e poco coinvolgenti e la stessa Mrs Bridge, con quel suo modo di pensare d’altri tempi e – impossibile non notarli – quegli atteggiamenti un po’ razzisti e classisti (secondo i quali i neri si possono frequentare solo entro certi limiti e la porta sul retro deve essere riservata alle donne di servizio), a tratti non si rende troppo apprezzabile, tant’è vero che sono anzitutto i figli a mal sopportarla. La storia, nel suo complesso, genera però riflessioni e interrogativi che nessuno credo possa eludere e in questo consiste la forza del romanzo. La penna dell’autore è stata abile ad allargare, a piccole ma inesorabili dosi, il baratro del vuoto interiore in cui spesso si precipita, a far esplodere d’improvviso l’inquietudine di fronte a certi atteggiamenti incomprensibilmente estranei da parte di chi si crede di conoscere bene e invece non si conosce mai fino in fondo, a dipingere una sorta di grigiore che si nutre di noia, solitudine, insoddisfazione e infelicità mai confessate a cui la vita sembra rassegnarsi per inerzia, fino a quello sconsolato e sconsolante “C’è qualcuno là fuori?” della scena finale…
Veramente tremendo rendersi conto del fatto che, pur essendoci sempre stati per gli altri, anche a scapito di noi stessi, nessuno alla fine ci sarà per noi.
Profondo è il senso di solitudine e d'impotenza dinanzi alla ineluttabilità del tempo che trasmette la storia di Mrs Bridge. Una storia, in verità, di ordinaria quotidianità, una come tante, ben lontana dai clamori e dai colpi di scena eclatanti. Senza infamia e senza lode, potremmo forse aggiungere.
Pubblicato negli Stati Uniti alla fine degli anni Cinquanta, il libro racconta, sullo sfondo dell’America dei decenni precedenti, la vicenda di una donna che da figlia diventa moglie e madre seguendo i normali e prevedibili percorsi della vita. Una grande casa, un marito avvocato per lo più assente e tre figli a cui consacrare, con amore e forte senso del dovere, ogni singolo istante delle proprie giornate sempre così piene, ma in realtà vuote di qualcosa difficile da spiegare. Così trascorrono gli anni, all’inizio lenti, poi via via sempre più impietosi, senza che lei riesca per davvero a trovare tempo per se stessa; non bastano i cocktail e feste varie, gli incontri con le amiche, le attività nel sociale a dare un senso al quotidiano vivere; e l’incosciente consapevolezza di appartenere a quella categoria di persone che esistono senza aver vissuto (“ignare fino all’ultimo della vita”) si rivelerà infine un peso decisamente opprimente da sopportare. È vero: di una donna come questa potremmo essere figli, così come in ogni giovane donna c’è una potenziale signora Bridge.
Quest’opera di Evan S. Connell è un buon romanzo dallo stile narrativo semplice e dal contenuto denso di significato. Il mio giudizio complessivo è di tre stelle e ½, poiché diversi capitoli risultano forse troppo lenti e poco coinvolgenti e la stessa Mrs Bridge, con quel suo modo di pensare d’altri tempi e – impossibile non notarli – quegli atteggiamenti un po’ razzisti e classisti (secondo i quali i neri si possono frequentare solo entro certi limiti e la porta sul retro deve essere riservata alle donne di servizio), a tratti non si rende troppo apprezzabile, tant’è vero che sono anzitutto i figli a mal sopportarla. La storia, nel suo complesso, genera però riflessioni e interrogativi che nessuno credo possa eludere e in questo consiste la forza del romanzo. La penna dell’autore è stata abile ad allargare, a piccole ma inesorabili dosi, il baratro del vuoto interiore in cui spesso si precipita, a far esplodere d’improvviso l’inquietudine di fronte a certi atteggiamenti incomprensibilmente estranei da parte di chi si crede di conoscere bene e invece non si conosce mai fino in fondo, a dipingere una sorta di grigiore che si nutre di noia, solitudine, insoddisfazione e infelicità mai confessate a cui la vita sembra rassegnarsi per inerzia, fino a quello sconsolato e sconsolante “C’è qualcuno là fuori?” della scena finale…
Veramente tremendo rendersi conto del fatto che, pur essendoci sempre stati per gli altri, anche a scapito di noi stessi, nessuno alla fine ci sarà per noi.
May 28, 2016
I'm bewildered that none of you have even shelved this remarkable book, my friends!
I despair.;p
Each tiny chapter is brilliant in its simplicity, yet manages to paint a marvelous and merciless portrait of an American upper-class woman and her family in the 1930's. Suffocating, tragic, hilarious, and in essence still hauntingly relevant.
That's probably also where my vague sense of discomfort stems from. Mrs. Bridge lived in a time that perfectly excused the superficiality of her life, and her 'unawareness' and continuous battle for her family to be considered 'agreeably normal'. And, hey!, we cannot all live wild and ferociously. But that little voice nagging at the back of her mind, those daily disappointments, and her growing sense of futility, it all somehow had a familiar ring to it? I suppose there's a reason why self help books are as massively popular today as they were when Mrs. Bridge bought them. I'm sure they still collect as much dust on a bookshelves today as they did in Mrs. Bridge's house too.
Connell painted an ever so subtle but harsh portrait of how Mrs. Bridge's life unfolded and, not unimportantly, that of her children. Book character or not, Mrs. Bridge wasn't the first to lead a pleasant enough privileged life that simultaneously lacked the stuff dreams are made of. And she won't be the last.
Mrs. Bridge did not make me see that the things of real value in life are free, and awfully vulnerable. I already knew. But she sure made me have to swallow away a lump in my throat and grab my partner for a cuddle.
I must now read everything Evan. S. Connell.
I despair.;p
Each tiny chapter is brilliant in its simplicity, yet manages to paint a marvelous and merciless portrait of an American upper-class woman and her family in the 1930's. Suffocating, tragic, hilarious, and in essence still hauntingly relevant.
That's probably also where my vague sense of discomfort stems from. Mrs. Bridge lived in a time that perfectly excused the superficiality of her life, and her 'unawareness' and continuous battle for her family to be considered 'agreeably normal'. And, hey!, we cannot all live wild and ferociously. But that little voice nagging at the back of her mind, those daily disappointments, and her growing sense of futility, it all somehow had a familiar ring to it? I suppose there's a reason why self help books are as massively popular today as they were when Mrs. Bridge bought them. I'm sure they still collect as much dust on a bookshelves today as they did in Mrs. Bridge's house too.
Connell painted an ever so subtle but harsh portrait of how Mrs. Bridge's life unfolded and, not unimportantly, that of her children. Book character or not, Mrs. Bridge wasn't the first to lead a pleasant enough privileged life that simultaneously lacked the stuff dreams are made of. And she won't be the last.
She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.
Mrs. Bridge did not make me see that the things of real value in life are free, and awfully vulnerable. I already knew. But she sure made me have to swallow away a lump in my throat and grab my partner for a cuddle.
I must now read everything Evan. S. Connell.
January 14, 2022
Una lectura estupenda, un clásico publicado en 1959 que podemos calificar de feminista. Es un autor que yo desconocía y aquí nos ofrece un retrato magnífico de una ama de casa suburbana, típica de las emergentes clases medias americanas. La protagonista es una mujer que lo tiene todo: un marido competitivo que le proporciona un hogar agradable, tres hijos y una buena posición social. Pero nos encontramos con el retrato de un gran vacío.
India Bridge es una mujer que no tiene vida u opiniones propias, y todo lo hace en función de los otros. Siempre quiere hacer lo mejor y ayudar a todos dentro de los valores que se le han transmitido y que intenta inculcar en sus propios hijos.
Los capítulos son muy breves, pequeñas anécdotas cotidianas y domésticas que son sin embargo muy reveladoras, no sólo de su vida y sus sentimientos, sino de toda la sociedad que la rodea. Los años van pasando y su sentimiento de soledad y desarraigo empeora cuando los hijos se hacen mayores y ella se siente cada vez menos necesaria.
Muy bien escrita, es una lectura fácil incluso en versión original y mantiene el interés hasta el magnífico final - que es una gran y demoledora metáfora de sus sentimientos.
Quiero leer la continuación Mr. Bridge escrita diez años después por el mismo autor, porque siento curiosidad por la versión de la misma historia contada desde el punto de vista del marido.
India Bridge es una mujer que no tiene vida u opiniones propias, y todo lo hace en función de los otros. Siempre quiere hacer lo mejor y ayudar a todos dentro de los valores que se le han transmitido y que intenta inculcar en sus propios hijos.
Los capítulos son muy breves, pequeñas anécdotas cotidianas y domésticas que son sin embargo muy reveladoras, no sólo de su vida y sus sentimientos, sino de toda la sociedad que la rodea. Los años van pasando y su sentimiento de soledad y desarraigo empeora cuando los hijos se hacen mayores y ella se siente cada vez menos necesaria.
Muy bien escrita, es una lectura fácil incluso en versión original y mantiene el interés hasta el magnífico final - que es una gran y demoledora metáfora de sus sentimientos.
Quiero leer la continuación Mr. Bridge escrita diez años después por el mismo autor, porque siento curiosidad por la versión de la misma historia contada desde el punto de vista del marido.
September 4, 2017
Mrs Bridge.
Moglie devota, madre premurosa e amorevole, irrepresibile donna di casa e amica fedele.
Una perfetta rappresentante della classe benestante americana degli anni '40, con una domestica fissa, una villa con giardino e una Lincoln che va e non va, un marito sempre troppo indaffarato, che soddisfa i suoi desideri materiali ma che poi "non c'è", tre figli che crescono e se ne vanno, le partite a golf, i party a casa di amici e i pettegolezzi del quartiere. E, sullo sfondo, lo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale e l'invasione tedesca in Polonia proprio quando lei si trova nel bel mezzo del suo viaggio da sogno in Europa, sogno che il marito ha deciso di soddisfare.
Insomma, un'esistenza come tante. E, dentro di sè, quel vuoto, quell'indefinibile senso di sopraffazione, di paura, che pare attanagliarla a più riprese, come se improvvisamente si trovasse schiacciata in un angolo, e urlasse invano al mondo "Hey, sono qui, aiutatemi!": l'emblematica immagine con cui si chiude il romanzo rende alla perfezione questa sensazione. Di fatto, una sensazione che proviamo tutti. Perchè Mirs Bridge è tutti. Un personaggio potente e vivissimo, per quanto, nella sua vita comune non accadda nulla di straordinario: ma è proprio questo a renderla straordinaria, un piccolo grande specchio in cui rimirarsi, lei con la sua attenzione alla forma, la sua tendenza a sdramatizzare, i suoi dubbi e la sua nostalgia per la famiglia che si disgrega e per i tempi che cambiano. Una conformista piena d'amore e d'angoscia per quella vita che pare scivolarle dalle dita. Anche l'immagine di copertina, con questa donna ben vestita e ben acconciata che osserva fuori dalla finestra, secondo me è del tutto azzeccata.
Il retro di copertina sostiene che "Mrs Bridge" è da mettere sullo stesso scaffale di "Stoner" e di "Revolutionary Road": è vero. Vi ho letto quella disfatta della normalità, quel senso di impotenza che appartiene all'umanità, quel trovarsi dentro e contemporaneamente fuori dal mondo. Vi ho trovato, a dire i vero, più somiglianza con "Stoner" che con Yates, i cui personaggi sono irremediabilmente destinati, fra le pagine, a cadere tutti in un baratro...è come se qui, invece, ci si fermi direttamente sull'orlo del precipizio, non ancora nel buio, ma inacpaci di fare un passo indietro. Il tutto narrato con una scrittura sobria e uno stile preciso e scrupoloso.
Le cinque stelline sono meritate perchè a mio avviso un libro è un libro di grande valore. E tra l'altro è uno dei primi libri che ho scoperto su Goodreads, navigando fra scaffali e recensioni dei miei amici: sono molto contenta di averlo letto!
Moglie devota, madre premurosa e amorevole, irrepresibile donna di casa e amica fedele.
Una perfetta rappresentante della classe benestante americana degli anni '40, con una domestica fissa, una villa con giardino e una Lincoln che va e non va, un marito sempre troppo indaffarato, che soddisfa i suoi desideri materiali ma che poi "non c'è", tre figli che crescono e se ne vanno, le partite a golf, i party a casa di amici e i pettegolezzi del quartiere. E, sullo sfondo, lo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale e l'invasione tedesca in Polonia proprio quando lei si trova nel bel mezzo del suo viaggio da sogno in Europa, sogno che il marito ha deciso di soddisfare.
Insomma, un'esistenza come tante. E, dentro di sè, quel vuoto, quell'indefinibile senso di sopraffazione, di paura, che pare attanagliarla a più riprese, come se improvvisamente si trovasse schiacciata in un angolo, e urlasse invano al mondo "Hey, sono qui, aiutatemi!": l'emblematica immagine con cui si chiude il romanzo rende alla perfezione questa sensazione. Di fatto, una sensazione che proviamo tutti. Perchè Mirs Bridge è tutti. Un personaggio potente e vivissimo, per quanto, nella sua vita comune non accadda nulla di straordinario: ma è proprio questo a renderla straordinaria, un piccolo grande specchio in cui rimirarsi, lei con la sua attenzione alla forma, la sua tendenza a sdramatizzare, i suoi dubbi e la sua nostalgia per la famiglia che si disgrega e per i tempi che cambiano. Una conformista piena d'amore e d'angoscia per quella vita che pare scivolarle dalle dita. Anche l'immagine di copertina, con questa donna ben vestita e ben acconciata che osserva fuori dalla finestra, secondo me è del tutto azzeccata.
Il retro di copertina sostiene che "Mrs Bridge" è da mettere sullo stesso scaffale di "Stoner" e di "Revolutionary Road": è vero. Vi ho letto quella disfatta della normalità, quel senso di impotenza che appartiene all'umanità, quel trovarsi dentro e contemporaneamente fuori dal mondo. Vi ho trovato, a dire i vero, più somiglianza con "Stoner" che con Yates, i cui personaggi sono irremediabilmente destinati, fra le pagine, a cadere tutti in un baratro...è come se qui, invece, ci si fermi direttamente sull'orlo del precipizio, non ancora nel buio, ma inacpaci di fare un passo indietro. Il tutto narrato con una scrittura sobria e uno stile preciso e scrupoloso.
Le cinque stelline sono meritate perchè a mio avviso un libro è un libro di grande valore. E tra l'altro è uno dei primi libri che ho scoperto su Goodreads, navigando fra scaffali e recensioni dei miei amici: sono molto contenta di averlo letto!
May 3, 2024
“And the distant thunder seemed to be warning her that one day this world she knew and loved would be annihilated.”
With Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell has concocted a charming blend of comedy and tragedy. His approach is compassionately satirical, perfectly in line with my own feelings as I read.
It was Kansas City in the time between the World Wars. Mr. Bridge was a busy and successful lawyer, and Mrs. Bridge a “homemaker,” a society lady. Her job was to make sure their three children had good manners and didn’t stand out too much.
“In the morning one doesn’t wear earrings that dangle.”
Her time was spent shopping, volunteering and regularly attending Ladies Auxiliary meetings. A celebration for the couple called for steak dinner at the country club.
Like the maxims she’s heard and repeats, she reiterates bigotry, classism, and small-mindedness, while you get the feeling somewhere in the back of her mind she’s not sure she agrees.
The story is told in short vignettes, each showing a different side of this lifestyle. In the beginning there are very funny snapshots of the children growing up, but in the background of these little pictures and observations, we feel the world changing. As time moves along, we experience Mrs. Bridge struggling to find fulfillment, “…knowing what she wanted without knowing how to ask for it.”
India Bridge is someone I understand. Did things change at a much slower pace back then? It seems like my growing up in the 1960’s wasn’t that different from the 1930’s and 40’s presented here, but now the speed of change is so fast I don’t know how anyone can relate to the generation before them. The small-mindedness remains rampant, and perhaps women like this still exist in wealthy enclaves, but I haven’t seen any in a long time--women who were raised to become housewives, women whose primary responsibility was to make sure their home and family met society’s expectations, but whose husbands were called the head of the household.
This was still a part of the culture when I was growing up so it’s as familiar to me as, I don’t know, Lawrence Welk music or "Leave it to Beaver." We laughed at those shows, but they were funny because we knew the truth in them. We saw it, maybe in our parents or grandparents or neighbors. We mocked these long-established social norms and sex roles, but at some level we understood them. I felt the same about Mrs. Bridge.
This was an entertaining character study, but it left me with something more: tender feelings for people who came before me and gratitude for the way some things have changed.
With Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell has concocted a charming blend of comedy and tragedy. His approach is compassionately satirical, perfectly in line with my own feelings as I read.
It was Kansas City in the time between the World Wars. Mr. Bridge was a busy and successful lawyer, and Mrs. Bridge a “homemaker,” a society lady. Her job was to make sure their three children had good manners and didn’t stand out too much.
“In the morning one doesn’t wear earrings that dangle.”
Her time was spent shopping, volunteering and regularly attending Ladies Auxiliary meetings. A celebration for the couple called for steak dinner at the country club.
Like the maxims she’s heard and repeats, she reiterates bigotry, classism, and small-mindedness, while you get the feeling somewhere in the back of her mind she’s not sure she agrees.
The story is told in short vignettes, each showing a different side of this lifestyle. In the beginning there are very funny snapshots of the children growing up, but in the background of these little pictures and observations, we feel the world changing. As time moves along, we experience Mrs. Bridge struggling to find fulfillment, “…knowing what she wanted without knowing how to ask for it.”
India Bridge is someone I understand. Did things change at a much slower pace back then? It seems like my growing up in the 1960’s wasn’t that different from the 1930’s and 40’s presented here, but now the speed of change is so fast I don’t know how anyone can relate to the generation before them. The small-mindedness remains rampant, and perhaps women like this still exist in wealthy enclaves, but I haven’t seen any in a long time--women who were raised to become housewives, women whose primary responsibility was to make sure their home and family met society’s expectations, but whose husbands were called the head of the household.
This was still a part of the culture when I was growing up so it’s as familiar to me as, I don’t know, Lawrence Welk music or "Leave it to Beaver." We laughed at those shows, but they were funny because we knew the truth in them. We saw it, maybe in our parents or grandparents or neighbors. We mocked these long-established social norms and sex roles, but at some level we understood them. I felt the same about Mrs. Bridge.
This was an entertaining character study, but it left me with something more: tender feelings for people who came before me and gratitude for the way some things have changed.
February 4, 2021
In a series of 117 vignettes, Evan S. Connell depicts the life of Mrs Bridge, a housewife with no opinions or will of her own. She teaches her children what her parents taught her, and the world seems to be black and white: on one side the conservative, good way of living; on the other hand, a free-thinking dangerous life which should be avoidable by respectable people.
The novel begins with Mr and Mrs Bridge meeting. Their marriage is a kind of genesis: see, this woman has no significance whatsoever outside her role as a wife and a mother! Her well-off husband, a successful lawyer, provides her with a life of ease in which she doesn't even have to cook or do the laundry. And as her children grow up, she loses control of their lives and eventually they don't know each other anymore. She wasted her life without actually living.
Connell smashes the American dream and capitalism with his dry, witty, sarcastic vignettes, whose titles create an ironic contrast with the tense paragraphs.
And some passages are gloriously fun:
"That evening she instructed Carolyn. 'You should say the cleaning "woman". A lady is someone like Mrs Arlen or Mrs Montgomery."
[In Rome] "Don't let them fool you", said Mr Bridge. 'These people would sell their souls to get to the United States.'"
Good, but not great. Its style is not really my cup of tea.
The novel begins with Mr and Mrs Bridge meeting. Their marriage is a kind of genesis: see, this woman has no significance whatsoever outside her role as a wife and a mother! Her well-off husband, a successful lawyer, provides her with a life of ease in which she doesn't even have to cook or do the laundry. And as her children grow up, she loses control of their lives and eventually they don't know each other anymore. She wasted her life without actually living.
Connell smashes the American dream and capitalism with his dry, witty, sarcastic vignettes, whose titles create an ironic contrast with the tense paragraphs.
And some passages are gloriously fun:
"That evening she instructed Carolyn. 'You should say the cleaning "woman". A lady is someone like Mrs Arlen or Mrs Montgomery."
[In Rome] "Don't let them fool you", said Mr Bridge. 'These people would sell their souls to get to the United States.'"
Good, but not great. Its style is not really my cup of tea.
July 30, 2013
I loved every page of Mrs. Bridge. Evan Connell painted a picture of an upper-class wife in 1930s Kansas City, and he did it through a series of vignettes. Each short story makes the picture more complete, and we see how desperate Mrs. Bridge is to make her husband happy, to fit in with society and to instill good values in her children. She tries to be interested in news and politics, but admits it's so much easier to just ask her husband who to vote for. She doesn't like to attend loud parties or scandalous plays, or to be improperly dressed, which means wearing pantyhose even when it's 100 degrees outside. The novel is beautifully sad, because we can see how lonesome Mrs. Bridge is and how desperately she wants to be loved, but she doesn't have the vocabulary (or the courage) to ask for what she needs.
Poor Mrs. Bridge is trapped in a pre-feminist era, and some readers may get frustrated with her for not standing up for herself or for relying so much on her husband, but remember that we're viewing her through a modern lens. To love Mrs. Bridge you have to remember the historical context. This novel was published in 1959, but there are still many wives who resemble Mrs. Bridge, and she was all too real. She even reminded me of several of my old-fashioned relatives.
I have picked up this book several times since I first read it, and when I do I fall into a contented state and will reread half of it before I decide to lovingly set it back down again. I have so many favorite scenes that to list them would be to recreate the entire novel.
I recommend reading Mrs. Bridge first and then following up with Mr. Bridge, which gives his point of view on the marriage. Mr. Bridge was published 10 years after Mrs., so you're reading them chronologically.
Connell grew up in Kansas City and seemed to relish describing the town of his youth. I look forward to reading more of his books.
Poor Mrs. Bridge is trapped in a pre-feminist era, and some readers may get frustrated with her for not standing up for herself or for relying so much on her husband, but remember that we're viewing her through a modern lens. To love Mrs. Bridge you have to remember the historical context. This novel was published in 1959, but there are still many wives who resemble Mrs. Bridge, and she was all too real. She even reminded me of several of my old-fashioned relatives.
I have picked up this book several times since I first read it, and when I do I fall into a contented state and will reread half of it before I decide to lovingly set it back down again. I have so many favorite scenes that to list them would be to recreate the entire novel.
I recommend reading Mrs. Bridge first and then following up with Mr. Bridge, which gives his point of view on the marriage. Mr. Bridge was published 10 years after Mrs., so you're reading them chronologically.
Connell grew up in Kansas City and seemed to relish describing the town of his youth. I look forward to reading more of his books.
June 17, 2013
when i was in mcnally jackson on my last visit to new york, i dragged greg over to a table, asking him about Son of the Morning Star, the evan s. connell book i'd set out to read several years ago before stumbling upon this book, mrs. bridge, instead. i was concerned about the small font size in the morning star edition the store carried and wanted to know if b&n had a bigger-fonted one. when we returned to the book there was a man standing there looking at mrs. bridge, stationed just beside connell's other famous work, and i accosted him with enthusiasm.. i told him how wonderful it was and then reiterated my constant refrain that even though written ten years apart, the two books are perfectly matched, i feel strongly that both mrs. bridge and mr. bridge together should, and must be read. individually, they are accomplished works; together they are magic. he nervously shied away and i did not sell a book for mcnally-jackson that day (though i did buy a cabell through their book expresso machine). you are welcome to sneak away from my exhortations, but i will just feel sorry for you that you deprived yourself of these exquisite portraits.
considering mrs. bridge, i have learned that connell began trying to write it in the early 1950s, attempting a more straightforward narrative but eventually set upon its final form: a series of vignettes, a stack of literary polaroids taken by a budding family photographer if you will, organized in an album in such a way that these scattered moments, that overlap and sometimes gap but come together to quietly and intimately reveal mrs. bridge's character to the reader, alleviating the growing distance that she feels the longer she lives, and echoing the album she will take refuge in late in life. some twelve of these vignettes were published starting in 1955 in the paris review, and eventually the full book saw light of day in 1959. i think that structure coupled with connell's consummately concise yet compassionate prose allowed me to connect with this WASP-y woman in a way that would never happen in real life, seeing as i am practically everything she has ever suppressed, or repressed. she would never know what to make of me, even if she were to read a book about me, even if evan s. connell had written it. and she would certainly not want me to go bowling with her douglas. i imagine she'd size me up the way she does the lucky paquita:
"The girl was a gypsy-looking business with stringy black uncombed hair, hairy brown arms jingling with bracelets, and glittering mascaraed eyes in which there was a look of deadly experience.
...
"How do you, Paquita?" she said, smiling neutrally, after Douglas had mumbled an introduction. The girl did not speak and Mrs. Bridge wondered if she understood English."
and yet, i felt a lot of compassion for mrs. bridge. she's not a very strong woman, she's not very bright either, and she's not exceptionally beautiful. she's not especially great at anything, really, beyond collecting silver, and making every effort to be respectable. but she means well, or at least wants to, and she feels she ought to be better, and to know more. sometimes being better means reinforcing segregation, or stifling creativity, imposing limitations not only on her children but herself, to ensure that she is the right kind of person because she is doing the best job she can to be the best wife and mother to her three children that she can be. yet she has self-doubt and the turmoil she feels is represented by the time she spends with madge arlen, the ladies' club lady, and grace barron, who plays baseball with her kids and goes to art galleries. it's mrs. bridge's tragedy to be just a little self-aware, to be cognizant of the distance, and the lacks in her life, of intimacy, and of passion of any kind. there are sometimes flickers but she extinguishes them almost as soon as they begin to burn. This passage comes early on in the book and is the beginning of understanding her:
"She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way - because she willed it to be so - her wants and her expectations were the same.
For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However, nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep."
and a longer one from "voting", which demonstrates one of her closest breakthroughs: (if interested, the paris review versions of the 1955 stories were reposted online to honour connell's death in january of this year: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20... i found it most edifying to see how much revision these saw before inclusion in the novel.)
"This was how she defended herself to Mable Ong after having incautiously let slip the information that her husband always told her how to vote.
"Don’t you have a mind of your own?" Mabel demanded, looking quite grim. "Great Scott, woman, you’re an adult. Speak out! We've been emancipated." She rocked back and forth from her heels to her toes, hands clasped behind her back, while she frowned at the carpet of the Auxiliary clubhouse.
"You’re right, of course," Mrs. Bridge apologized, discreetly avoiding the stream of smoke from Mabel's cigarette. "But don't you find it hard to know what to think? There’s so much scandal and fraud everywhere you turn, and I suppose the papers only print what they want us to know." She hesitated, then spoke out boldly, "How do you make up your mind?"
Mabel Ong, without removing the cigarette from her small lips, considered the ceiling, the carpet, and squinted critically at a Degas print on the wall, as though debating on how to answer such an ingenuous question, and finally she suggested that Mrs. Bridge might begin to grasp the fundamentals by a deliberate reading of certain books, which she jotted down on the margin of a tally card. Mrs. Bridge had not heard of any of these books except one, and this was because its author had committed suicide, but she decided to read it anyway.
The lady at her favourite rental library had never heard of the book, which was somehow gratifying; even so, having resolved to read it, Mrs. Bridge set out for the public library. Here, at last, she got it and settled down to the deliberate reading that Mabel had advised. The author’s name was Zokoloff, which certainly sounded threatening, and to be sure the first chapter was about bribery in the circuit courts.
When she had gotten far enough along that she felt capable of discussing it she left it on the hall table; however Mr. Bridge did not even notice it until it had lain there for three days. She watched him pick it up, saw his nostrils flatten as he read the title, and then she waited nervously and excitedly. He opened the book, read a few sentences, grunted, and dropped the book on the table. This was disappointing. In fact, now that there was no danger involved, she had trouble finishing the book; she thought it would be better in a magazine digest. But eventually she did finish it and returned it to the library, saying with a slight air of sophistication, "I can't honestly say I agree with it all but he’s certainly well informed."
Certain arguments of Zokoloff remained with her and she found that the longer she thought about them the more penetrating and logical they became; surely it was time, as he insisted, for a change in government. She decided to vote liberal at the next election, and as time for it approached she became filled with such enthusiasm and with such conviction and determination that she planned to discuss her new attitude with her husband. She became confident that she could persuade him to change his vote also. Politics were not mysterious after all. However, when she challenged him to discussion he did not seem especially interested; in fact he did not answer. He was studying a sheaf of legal papers and only glanced across at her for an instant with an annoyed expression. She let it go until the following evening when he was momentarily unoccupied, and this time, he stared at her curiously, intently, as if probing her mind, and then all at once he snorted.
She really intended to force a discussion on election eve. She was going to quote from the book of Zokoloff. But he came home so late, so exhausted, that she had not the heart to upset him. She concluded it would be best to let him vote as he always had, and she would do as she herself wished; still, on getting to the polls, which were conveniently located in the country-club shopping district, she became doubtful and a little uneasy. And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was."
poor mrs. bridge. as you can see, in all things, she means well. and when we look at ourselves in her mirror, we identify with her despite our differences. at least i did to a very great degree. an amazing novel. apparently there are others cut from this cloth but i do not feel any desire to read them. i have already found the two i needed.
considering mrs. bridge, i have learned that connell began trying to write it in the early 1950s, attempting a more straightforward narrative but eventually set upon its final form: a series of vignettes, a stack of literary polaroids taken by a budding family photographer if you will, organized in an album in such a way that these scattered moments, that overlap and sometimes gap but come together to quietly and intimately reveal mrs. bridge's character to the reader, alleviating the growing distance that she feels the longer she lives, and echoing the album she will take refuge in late in life. some twelve of these vignettes were published starting in 1955 in the paris review, and eventually the full book saw light of day in 1959. i think that structure coupled with connell's consummately concise yet compassionate prose allowed me to connect with this WASP-y woman in a way that would never happen in real life, seeing as i am practically everything she has ever suppressed, or repressed. she would never know what to make of me, even if she were to read a book about me, even if evan s. connell had written it. and she would certainly not want me to go bowling with her douglas. i imagine she'd size me up the way she does the lucky paquita:
"The girl was a gypsy-looking business with stringy black uncombed hair, hairy brown arms jingling with bracelets, and glittering mascaraed eyes in which there was a look of deadly experience.
...
"How do you, Paquita?" she said, smiling neutrally, after Douglas had mumbled an introduction. The girl did not speak and Mrs. Bridge wondered if she understood English."
and yet, i felt a lot of compassion for mrs. bridge. she's not a very strong woman, she's not very bright either, and she's not exceptionally beautiful. she's not especially great at anything, really, beyond collecting silver, and making every effort to be respectable. but she means well, or at least wants to, and she feels she ought to be better, and to know more. sometimes being better means reinforcing segregation, or stifling creativity, imposing limitations not only on her children but herself, to ensure that she is the right kind of person because she is doing the best job she can to be the best wife and mother to her three children that she can be. yet she has self-doubt and the turmoil she feels is represented by the time she spends with madge arlen, the ladies' club lady, and grace barron, who plays baseball with her kids and goes to art galleries. it's mrs. bridge's tragedy to be just a little self-aware, to be cognizant of the distance, and the lacks in her life, of intimacy, and of passion of any kind. there are sometimes flickers but she extinguishes them almost as soon as they begin to burn. This passage comes early on in the book and is the beginning of understanding her:
"She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way - because she willed it to be so - her wants and her expectations were the same.
For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However, nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep."
and a longer one from "voting", which demonstrates one of her closest breakthroughs: (if interested, the paris review versions of the 1955 stories were reposted online to honour connell's death in january of this year: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20... i found it most edifying to see how much revision these saw before inclusion in the novel.)
"This was how she defended herself to Mable Ong after having incautiously let slip the information that her husband always told her how to vote.
"Don’t you have a mind of your own?" Mabel demanded, looking quite grim. "Great Scott, woman, you’re an adult. Speak out! We've been emancipated." She rocked back and forth from her heels to her toes, hands clasped behind her back, while she frowned at the carpet of the Auxiliary clubhouse.
"You’re right, of course," Mrs. Bridge apologized, discreetly avoiding the stream of smoke from Mabel's cigarette. "But don't you find it hard to know what to think? There’s so much scandal and fraud everywhere you turn, and I suppose the papers only print what they want us to know." She hesitated, then spoke out boldly, "How do you make up your mind?"
Mabel Ong, without removing the cigarette from her small lips, considered the ceiling, the carpet, and squinted critically at a Degas print on the wall, as though debating on how to answer such an ingenuous question, and finally she suggested that Mrs. Bridge might begin to grasp the fundamentals by a deliberate reading of certain books, which she jotted down on the margin of a tally card. Mrs. Bridge had not heard of any of these books except one, and this was because its author had committed suicide, but she decided to read it anyway.
The lady at her favourite rental library had never heard of the book, which was somehow gratifying; even so, having resolved to read it, Mrs. Bridge set out for the public library. Here, at last, she got it and settled down to the deliberate reading that Mabel had advised. The author’s name was Zokoloff, which certainly sounded threatening, and to be sure the first chapter was about bribery in the circuit courts.
When she had gotten far enough along that she felt capable of discussing it she left it on the hall table; however Mr. Bridge did not even notice it until it had lain there for three days. She watched him pick it up, saw his nostrils flatten as he read the title, and then she waited nervously and excitedly. He opened the book, read a few sentences, grunted, and dropped the book on the table. This was disappointing. In fact, now that there was no danger involved, she had trouble finishing the book; she thought it would be better in a magazine digest. But eventually she did finish it and returned it to the library, saying with a slight air of sophistication, "I can't honestly say I agree with it all but he’s certainly well informed."
Certain arguments of Zokoloff remained with her and she found that the longer she thought about them the more penetrating and logical they became; surely it was time, as he insisted, for a change in government. She decided to vote liberal at the next election, and as time for it approached she became filled with such enthusiasm and with such conviction and determination that she planned to discuss her new attitude with her husband. She became confident that she could persuade him to change his vote also. Politics were not mysterious after all. However, when she challenged him to discussion he did not seem especially interested; in fact he did not answer. He was studying a sheaf of legal papers and only glanced across at her for an instant with an annoyed expression. She let it go until the following evening when he was momentarily unoccupied, and this time, he stared at her curiously, intently, as if probing her mind, and then all at once he snorted.
She really intended to force a discussion on election eve. She was going to quote from the book of Zokoloff. But he came home so late, so exhausted, that she had not the heart to upset him. She concluded it would be best to let him vote as he always had, and she would do as she herself wished; still, on getting to the polls, which were conveniently located in the country-club shopping district, she became doubtful and a little uneasy. And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was."
poor mrs. bridge. as you can see, in all things, she means well. and when we look at ourselves in her mirror, we identify with her despite our differences. at least i did to a very great degree. an amazing novel. apparently there are others cut from this cloth but i do not feel any desire to read them. i have already found the two i needed.
May 27, 2016
Yet another book I’ve read this year where the female protagonist is alone in the end. A lifetime comes and goes, people move away or die, and there’s nothing to show for it. Why do I keep reading these books? My fears are showing.
Mrs. Bridge was a small woman in every way: compartmentalized, rigid, and afraid of almost everything. Her sheltered and empty life saunters leisurely through the decades and leads us to the final, almost perfect page. Absolute, helpless, terrifying aloneness. What a meaningless existence. What a waste.
This was not entirely affecting for me probably due to the vignette style of writing. If the aim was to make me feel as bleak and small as the Mrs. Bridges of the world – mission accomplished.
Mrs. Bridge was a small woman in every way: compartmentalized, rigid, and afraid of almost everything. Her sheltered and empty life saunters leisurely through the decades and leads us to the final, almost perfect page. Absolute, helpless, terrifying aloneness. What a meaningless existence. What a waste.
This was not entirely affecting for me probably due to the vignette style of writing. If the aim was to make me feel as bleak and small as the Mrs. Bridges of the world – mission accomplished.
September 19, 2017
Vita di una donna che si comporta sempre e invariabilmente come le convenzioni e “la convenienza” prescrivono; madre di tre figli, moglie fedele, devota e remissiva. Una donna che non sembra mai avere desideri propri, mai un guizzo di volontà, solo qualche vaga aspirazione, molto modesta, tipo imparare lo spagnolo, ampliare il proprio vocabolario, fare un corso di pittura. Non è una cattiva persona, la signora Bridge, mostra anche buoni sentimenti, quando si concede uno spiraglio, un lieve agio, per esprimerli.
È mai se stessa questa donna, possiede una sua identità seppure ben nascosta dietro i comportamenti stereotipati?
Quel che vediamo, che appare già dalle prime pagine, è che la sua vita va in pezzi, un giorno alla volta, piano piano, senza clamore, inesorabilmente.
“Passava molto tempo a fissare il vuoto, oppressa da un senso di attesa. Ma attesa di che cosa? Non lo sapeva. Prima o poi qualcuno l’avrebbe cercata, avrebbe avuto bisogno di lei, ne era certa. Eppure i giorni passavano tutti uguali. Non accadeva mai niente di intenso, di estremo. Il tempo non scorreva”
Romanzo claustrofobico che mi ha ricordato, all’inizio, un po’ Yates e un po’ Cheever (per il settore sociale che inquadra e per il tipo di personaggio, triste, illuso, inconsapevole, solo), paragoni a dire il vero impietosi, perché non ho potuto fare a meno di constatare che questi due autori scrivono assai meglio di Connell. Soprattutto, ho rilevato una certa discontinuità - dei brevi capitoletti in cui è strutturato il romanzo ho trovato che alcuni fossero incisivi e inquadrassero bene il personaggio, ammantando il lettore di un senso di gelo, altri invece mi sono sembrati meno riusciti.
Eppure, andando avanti con la lettura, mi sono affezionata in modo particolare a questa donna, la cui personalità va a comporsi in modo molto preciso :ho avvertito la sua noia, il suo senso di vuoto e di futilità, la sua disperata solitudine, l’infelicità di cui riesce ad avere solo una vaghissima consapevolezza - insomma alla fine ho trovato la storia molto toccante. Quattro stelle meritatissime, dunque.
“alcune persone scivolano sulla superficie dell’esistenza per poi scendere discretamente e serenamente nella tomba, ignare fino all’ultimo della vita, di tutto ciò che essa può offrire, da loro neppure intravisto”
È mai se stessa questa donna, possiede una sua identità seppure ben nascosta dietro i comportamenti stereotipati?
Quel che vediamo, che appare già dalle prime pagine, è che la sua vita va in pezzi, un giorno alla volta, piano piano, senza clamore, inesorabilmente.
“Passava molto tempo a fissare il vuoto, oppressa da un senso di attesa. Ma attesa di che cosa? Non lo sapeva. Prima o poi qualcuno l’avrebbe cercata, avrebbe avuto bisogno di lei, ne era certa. Eppure i giorni passavano tutti uguali. Non accadeva mai niente di intenso, di estremo. Il tempo non scorreva”
Romanzo claustrofobico che mi ha ricordato, all’inizio, un po’ Yates e un po’ Cheever (per il settore sociale che inquadra e per il tipo di personaggio, triste, illuso, inconsapevole, solo), paragoni a dire il vero impietosi, perché non ho potuto fare a meno di constatare che questi due autori scrivono assai meglio di Connell. Soprattutto, ho rilevato una certa discontinuità - dei brevi capitoletti in cui è strutturato il romanzo ho trovato che alcuni fossero incisivi e inquadrassero bene il personaggio, ammantando il lettore di un senso di gelo, altri invece mi sono sembrati meno riusciti.
Eppure, andando avanti con la lettura, mi sono affezionata in modo particolare a questa donna, la cui personalità va a comporsi in modo molto preciso :ho avvertito la sua noia, il suo senso di vuoto e di futilità, la sua disperata solitudine, l’infelicità di cui riesce ad avere solo una vaghissima consapevolezza - insomma alla fine ho trovato la storia molto toccante. Quattro stelle meritatissime, dunque.
“alcune persone scivolano sulla superficie dell’esistenza per poi scendere discretamente e serenamente nella tomba, ignare fino all’ultimo della vita, di tutto ciò che essa può offrire, da loro neppure intravisto”
February 20, 2019
3.5 Stars rounded down. This was a very charming, simplistic story but for me, a little of that goes a long way. I just couldn't stay engaged and found myself skimming but that's certainly a reflection on me and not the author. Very well written.
November 11, 2018
I loved this book – my first 5-star read of 2016! I finished the last few pages sitting in the car while waiting for my son to buy lunch and was almost in tears. I came home and started telling my husband about it and then, of course, I was sobbing.
It’s a perfect read, impeccably written, and unique. The chapters are short and a pleasure to get through. They’re more like vignettes than chapters. Parts of it are funny, other parts are heartbreaking. It’s a perfectly observed story of an upper-middle class American woman in the suburban Midwest before World War II. All in all, it’s a simple and subtle read. Nothing incredible or major happens. No huge plot twists and turns. Yet it has profound depth and is incredibly insightful.
I plan on reading “Mr. Bridge” very soon, which is meant to be read after this one, I believe. It was published ten years later. I just remembered that both books were made into a movie with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. I haven’t seen it and am not sure if I will.
It’s a perfect read, impeccably written, and unique. The chapters are short and a pleasure to get through. They’re more like vignettes than chapters. Parts of it are funny, other parts are heartbreaking. It’s a perfectly observed story of an upper-middle class American woman in the suburban Midwest before World War II. All in all, it’s a simple and subtle read. Nothing incredible or major happens. No huge plot twists and turns. Yet it has profound depth and is incredibly insightful.
I plan on reading “Mr. Bridge” very soon, which is meant to be read after this one, I believe. It was published ten years later. I just remembered that both books were made into a movie with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. I haven’t seen it and am not sure if I will.
November 21, 2020
Told in a series of vignettes, this book paints a vivid portrait of an upper-middle class, Midwestern housewife in the 1940s. It illuminates the unabashed racism and sexism of the age, the attention to petty details that sustained everyday life, and the resulting frustration and ennui of the typical housewife of that time. I will be moving on to the second book in the series for sure.
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September 29, 2022While I was reading this book, I couldn't decide whether the author loved or hated his main character. I concluded eventually that it didn't matter, and that the skill with which he describes her, the settings he places her in, the incidents he makes happen in her life are enough. Judgement isn't necessary.
Mrs Bridge is simply and forever Mrs. Bridge.
Mrs Bridge is simply and forever Mrs. Bridge.
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