Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell. Pub 1959.
This was a recommendation from two years ago from my book club partner. I got it a few months later and made a few false starts on it last year. This year, I got stuck in and enjoyed it. The novel has 117 short chapters that provide vignettes and vantage points to an ordinary and melancholy life.
Mrs. Bridge is a suburban upper-middle-class housewife in the interwar years, in Kansas City. She has three children and a husband and a house and society. She has no ambition beyond these things. She occasionally takes steps to expand her horizons – learn Spanish, learn to paint, learn about the world – but hesitates to really get started at any of these. As such, she really does nothing throughout the book and most of her life, letting herself be moved forward as needed by those around her, and clinging to keeping up appearances and trying to keep things from changing.
Mrs. Bridge’s doing-nothingness (and her suppressed loneliness) comes through in her interior voice, which provides much of the narration of the story. She is focused and detailed about the mundane – what was served for lunch or who sat where in the living room – and then so perfunctory about significant events in her life and the world. For example, as part of recounting an extravagant trip to Europe, she explains how the trip was cut short with the brief “The Nazis are in Poland.” There’s no emotion or loss or real fear, just an incomprehension and a dutiful compliance with the decisions of others. The final scene is the height of tragicomedy and is the culmination of her doing-nothingness – in an ordinary conundrum, waiting for someone else to do something, trapped by the circumstances of her inability to change or move.
There is also a strange sublimation of the character by referring to her always as Mrs. Bridge rather than her first name, but this reflects how she perceives her own identity – one imagines that she refers to herself even as Mrs. Bridge. She likely can only see and understand herself in her role and relationships to others, and so it explains how she becomes even more lost when the lives around her that made her “Mrs.” grow and change and fade away.
As with Tauhou, Mrs. Bridge is comprised of many short chapters. The key difference – there’s a consistent narrative and characters through those chapters. Each is a vignette of sorts but is linked narratively and temporally to the previous and next. The stories somehow standalone but also weave together to tell about an ordinary life in an extraordinary way. There is some light comedy (not that Mrs. Bridge herself ever finds anything funny) and much quiet pathos as the reader both wants her to do something and for her to find peace where she is.
Fate: I will hang on to this one. Like my fellow book-clubber, I will seek out Mr. Bridge, and perhaps Connell’s other well-known book, Son of the Morning Star.
7- debut
9 – made into a film
11 – referral/chosen
13 – never been
14 – name in title
25 – new author to me
29 – leftover
36 – part of a series
rclr 