A Character Study in the Guise of a Novel
When my older son started kindergarten, his teacher asked the class how many of them knew how to read. A few kids raised their hands, and Miss D said, “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Then she asked how many of them couldn’t read, and the rest raised their hands. “Oh,” she said, “that’s wonderful, too. Because now you will get to learn how to read with Miss D.”
Posted — UpdatedWhen my older son started kindergarten, his teacher asked the class how many of them knew how to read. A few kids raised their hands, and Miss D said, “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Then she asked how many of them couldn’t read, and the rest raised their hands. “Oh,” she said, “that’s wonderful, too. Because now you will get to learn how to read with Miss D.”
I don’t remember the moment I first heard of “Mrs. Bridge”; it was one of the books that was in my house, and therefore my consciousness, when I was growing up. My parents’ books included the texts belonging to my therapist father. The titles blur all these decades later, but I can boil them down, thematically, to Families in Crisis and Sex, Sex, Freud and Sex, along with the (mostly) contemporary novels jointly belonging to him and my writer mother. “Mrs. Bridge,” the story of an upper-middle-class prewar Kansas City, Missouri, housewife and her family and social circle, was a book my mother taught back then as part of an adult-ed fiction class at the local library. And so it sometimes made its way through the rooms, appearing on a night table or kitchen counter, heavily underlined.
Over time “Mrs. Bridge” has achieved a status reached by very few books. The 50th anniversary edition refers to it on the cover as “A Classic American Novel.” And yet you can easily find references to it as “neglected.” Again and again, I meet people who don’t know it or haven’t thought to read it, so I find myself being a “Mrs. Bridge” evangelist, telling them that it’s a perfect novel, and then pressing copies on them.
I suspect that part of me wants to evangelize for Connell, who died in 2013, because he didn’t seem to do it very much for himself. And though he wrote many books, it’s his sublime first novel that I turn to.
Not much that can be considered “big” happens in “Mrs. Bridge,” which has been called a quiet masterpiece, but many small “big” things do, over 117 numbered, titled, short chapters (“Guest Towels,” “Lady Poet,” “Another Victim of Circumstances”), giving the book a spare, crisp quality that is something of an optical illusion, since it is also fully lived in and expansive.
The movie recreates one of the great scenes in “Mrs. Bridge.” It takes place during a tornado at the dreary country club to which the Bridges belong. Though everyone else has been evacuated from the dining room, Mr. Bridge insists that they continue with their meal, and in the novel the prose allows us to delve thrillingly deep into this moment, and we learn that Mrs. Bridge, who “for nearly a quarter of a century had done as he told her” longs to leave, but sits immobilized until the end, when “The tornado, whether impressed by his intransigence or touched by her devotion, had drawn itself up into the sky and was never seen or heard of again.” What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true. The whole book is like that.
Just as the trajectory of every writer’s life is different, every book’s life is different, too. “Mrs. Bridge” is one of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up it and someone else instantly responds with excitement. Favorite moments are mentioned (“The Doberman!” “Tarquin Leacock!” “Roast beeves!”), heads nod in rapid agreement, and suddenly the private experience of reading this quiet marvel transforms into something collective, connective and loud.
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Beyond ‘Mrs. Bridge’
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