Mrs Bridge
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Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century, influencing books such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. This edition has an introduction by Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and The Unnamed. Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty. The companion novel, Mr Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is published in early 2013 in Penguin Modern Classics, with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin. 'How it is done I only wish I knew' Dorothy Parker
Series
Featured Series
2 primary books#1 in Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge
Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 1959 with contributions by Evan S. Connell.
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A pitch-perfect novel. I think one of the many uses of Goodreads is the ability to discover works of literature that would have probably escaped me otherwise. This was on the Penguin modern classics list, I believe, and if it weren't for my desire to want to be a list completionist, then Mrs Bridge would have escaped me entirely.
What puts Mrs Bridge in the same category as other writers like Yates, Carver or Updike who have made astute observations about the suburban lifestyle of American society? Initially, the novel reads as a simple, straightforward portrait of a housewife, India Bridge and her devotion to her husband and three children. Yet much like the above writers, the text is much more layered than that. Evan S Connell deftly interweaves a variety of themes. Family relationships, privilege, the repression of social mores, and the longing to find one's individual self are scattered through the 117 short vignette-like chapters, each with its own title.
Most importantly, the reader gets a clear sense of the world that Mrs Bridge inhabits. Her life is not only filled with the challenges of being married to Mr Bridge, the rearing of her three children but just as important, keeping in line with the issues and concerns of her social setting. Mrs Bridge strives to find her place in the world she inhabits. Connell also demonstrates how the culture that Mrs Bride resides in can shape her views. For example, an earlier scene in the book has Mrs Bridge keeping a careful eye on her daughter's, Carolyn, relationship with a coloured girl, Alice Jones succumbing to the prejudice of her time.
The prose is outstanding, and many of the chapters end with a sense of closure. Consequently, each chapter is either a self-contained miniature event or things are left up for the reader to interpret. For example, this is how chapter 90 ends in which Mrs Bridge's son comes to realise that he has not fooled his mother about the reason why he crashed her car: “Although she had not said a word, he perceived that in some fantastic manner she sensed the complete truth, and he reflected that in matters however distantly related to sex she possessed supernatural powers of divination”.
Overall the narrative device used, the fact that the themes and issues Connell tackles are still relevant today, and it's the profound insight Mrs Bridge gives into the conditions of married and family life that make it a timeless masterpiece.
