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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.”

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A Character Study in the Guise of a Novel
By
MEG WOLITZER
, New York Times

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.”

When I think about the 1959 novel “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan S. Connell, a variant of this exchange occurs to me: If you have already read it, that’s wonderful, for chances are you love it, too, and know how brilliant it is. And if you haven’t read it, or perhaps have never even heard of it, well, that’s wonderful, too. Because you are still lucky enough to be able to read it for the first time.

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 novel is an extended character study, and in understanding the desperately conforming Mrs. Bridge, whose first name is India (“It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her”), Connell shows us her desires, the limitations imposed upon her and, again and again, her own personal limitations. Scattered throughout the novel are various attempts on her part, followed by retreats. When, for instance, Mrs. Bridge wants to see a psychoanalyst, she seeks her husband’s permission while he reads the newspaper: “Walter,” she began in a tremulous voice, and went on rapidly, “I’ve been thinking it over and I don’t see any way out except through analysis.” He did not look up. Minutes went by. Finally he muttered, “Australian wool is firm.”
But it’s not just that the novel is an eerily perceptive character study, though it is. I’m reminded of John Williams’ “Stoner,” or Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth.” Like those other remarkable novels, “Mrs. Bridge” offers not just a closegrained look at a character, but a wider view of what’s around her. In this case, it captures a person moving — or not — through life. And it’s not just that the novel is formally unconventional, about a supremely conventional person, or has much to say about repression, subjugation and emptiness. Its tone — knowing, droll, plaintive, shuttling rapidly between pain and hilarity — elevates it to its own kind of specialness. When Mrs. Bridge’s former art instructor appears at the door in bad shape, selling magazines, out of pity she agrees to buy a subscription to The Doberman, despite not owning a dog. “Gadbury raised his head and looked at her in grave astonishment.” As do we, repeatedly. I’ve never entirely warmed to “Mr. Bridge,” Connell’s 1969 novel. There was also a handsome 1990 Merchant-Ivory film, “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Despite the impressive pedigree, the movie didn’t seem to do enough to make readers see “Mrs. Bridge” as the particular achievement it really is. It’s faithful to both books, but what’s missing, to me, is that hard-to-describe thing that makes any good book singularly itself. It’s the sensation that you get being inside it. This is more than a matter of character or social acuity or tone; it’s also what might be considered the book’s room temperature.

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.

Beyond ‘Mrs. Bridge’

‘MR. BRIDGE’: A solid companion-piece, studded with more details from the Bridges’ Kansas City life.
‘THE ANATOMY LESSON AND OTHER STORIES’: This collection includes “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge,” first published in The Paris Review in 1955, and from which the novel “Mrs. Bridge” derives.
‘THE CONNOISSEUR’: An elegant novel that goes inside the mind and passions of an art collector.
‘THE PATRIOT’: Exploring the life of a Navy cadet (Connell served in the Naval Air Force in World War II), this is a war story, and a father-son tale.
‘SON OF THE MORNING STAR’: Connell’s deeply researched and dramatized history of Custer and the Little Bighorn shows his great range.

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