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Evan S. Connell

James Salter

Mrs. Bridge Paperback – Jan. 5 2010

by Evan S Connell (Author), James Salter (Afterword)

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Again and again. . . I find myself being a Mrs. Bridge evangelist, telling them that it's a perfect novel, and then pressing copies on them. . . What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true. --Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times

In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, events--all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation. In this special fiftieth anniversary edition, we are reminded once again why Mrs. Bridge has been hailed by readers and critics alike as one of the greatest novels in American literature.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Counterpoint LLC
Publication date

Jan. 5 2010
Dimensions

13.72 x 1.78 x 20.07 cm
ISBN-10

1582435685
ISBN-13

978-1582435688
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Popular Highlights in this book

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She never forgot this moment when she had almost apprehended the very meaning of life, and of the stars and planets, yes, and the flight of the earth.
Highlighted by 206 Kindle readers
And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was.
Highlighted by 189 Kindle readers
She was restless and unhappy and would spend hours thinking wistfully of the past, of those years just after her marriage when a day was all too brief.
Highlighted by 128 Kindle readers

Product description

Review

Praise for Mrs. Bridge

"When I think about [Mrs. Bridge]. . . 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. . . Again and again. . . I find myself being a Mrs. Bridge evangelist, telling them that it’s a perfect novel, and then pressing copies on them. . . What writing! Economical, piquant, beautiful, true." —Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times

"Mr. Connell writes of this woman without patronage, without snickers, without, indeed, any comment whatever on what he sets down of her life. He tells her story, less in sketches than in paragraphs, and how it is done I only wish I knew, but he makes Mrs. Bridge, her husband and her children and her neighbors understandable and, because understandable, moving, in his few taut words."" —Dorothy Parker, Esquire

""Mrs. Bridge is a hell of a portrait . . . She's as real and as pathetic and as sad as any character I have read in a long time."" —Wallace Stegner

About the Author

Evan S. Connell was the author of eighteen books, including Francisco Goya, Deus Lo Volt!, Mrs. Bridge, and Son of the Morning Star. He received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Counterpoint LLC; 50th Anniversary ed. edition (Jan. 5 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1582435685
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1582435688
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 255 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.72 x 1.78 x 20.07 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #160,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12,127 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
580 ratings

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Evan S. Connell
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James Salter
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James Salter (b. 1925) was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel (The Hunters, 1957) led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967) was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.”
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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

580 global ratings

5 star		52%
4 star		26%
3 star		14%
2 star		4%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Amazon Customer

Strange book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 4, 2018

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The flatness of the whole tone is actually fascinating. It would be terrible to be Mrs Bridge. Not sure if I recommend it.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 22, 2020

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While this book was written many gears ago it is timeless. It represents the struggles of being human, the complexity of life and the joys and disappointments we face with our children and families. The themes and ideas are as meaningful today as the when it was written. The book will draw you in to a world that is recognizable. A wonderful read!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 30, 2015

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This was probably the book that has stuck with me of all the books I've read in the last year. The quotidian events happening around Mrs. Bridge are transformed into a reflection of the times, and the character of the family members. So good.

Helpful

Orrin C. Judd

where's the bridge back ?

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 8, 2001

She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others. -Mrs. Bridge
...
Toward the end of the book, their son Douglas heads off to WWII. But where the senior Bridges are tradition bound and deeply conformist, their children and their society are changing rapidly. In 117 vignettes, Evan Connell paints a sympathetic but fairly condescending portrait of Mrs. Bridge as she fights to hold back the tide of these changes. She struggles to preserve proprieties and appearances as her three children grow increasingly rebellious at the stifling social conventions that she seeks to force upon them.
Meanwhile, as the children grow away from her, and with Mr. Bridge completely focused on his legal work, Mrs. Bridge begins to sense an emptiness in her own life. At one point, a friend who later takes her own life asks : "Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tales--the ones who were all hollowed out in back?" This is pretty clearly Connell's point in the book, that Mrs. Bridge, however likable, is indeed hollow, that she is all deference to her husband, service to her children, and conformity to public mores, with no room left over for a unique and genuine person. He conveys this message with great humor and no little understanding, but it can't help but be a pretty harsh indictment of her essentially wasted life.
This is, of course, a rather conventional view of Middle America, particularly the Middle America of the 1910s and 1920s...Unfortunately for the literary class, their dismissive judgment of the...Bridges has proven quite wrong-headed. In retrospect it has become obvious that removing the religious, social, and moral constraints which the Bridge children (and Connell and Lewis and so on) found so laughable has not led to greater happiness and personal fulfillment but instead has produced a society consumed by its own pathologies...
Interestingly enough, Evan Connell, Mrs. Bridge and the Bridge children all seem to intuitively grasp the fact that the world of the Bridges is too valuable to toss away. Connell's portrayal of Mrs. Bridge is entirely too sympathetic for us to seriously believe that he thinks she's wasted her life. Moreover, the three best scenes in the novel all deal favorably with the life she has chosen. There's a moment where she considers voting for the radical Left in an election, but instead :
...when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was.
Then there are two scenes with Mr. Bridge, the famous one where, having gone to their club to celebrate their anniversary, he refuses to leave the dinner table as a tornado approaches. The twister does indeed miss them, but the episode suggests the solidity of Mr. Bridge and of their marriage, both unyielding even to forces of nature :
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.
And in the most moving scene, Mrs. Bridge, despite having not cooked in years, tries to make Mr. Bridge's favorite dessert, pineapple bread, and biffs it horribly, Mr. Bridge gently tells her, "Never mind", and the next day brings her a dozen roses. Though Mr. Bridge is rarely even present in the book, these episodes capture the strength and essential goodness of the marriage.
Finally, though the children move away, even move quite far away, the most pleasant thoughts of the more rebellious daughter are of home and the other daughter returns whenever there's trouble in her own ill-advised marriage. And the son, Douglas, grows up to be a man very much like his father. They, like Mrs. Bridge, and like the author himself, seem to realize that though the life that the Bridges have made may at first seem emotionally stunted, overly circumscribed, and unfulfilling, upon further reflection, there is something powerfully compelling about it. Will the children of the Bridges' children feel that same internal tug toward home ? And will their children ? One doubts it.
This book is terrific, by turns moving and funny and heartbreaking. But in the end, the Bridges come off much better than Connell intended, and forty years later they look better still. Would that we had a bridge back to the simple values they represent.
GRADE : A-

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Amazon Customer

Brilliantly Wrought Fiction of Upper Middle Class Ennui

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 29, 2002

Evan S. Connell's "Mrs. Bridge" is one of the truly outstanding works of Twentieth century American literature, a restrained, yet brilliantly wrought fictional portrait of upper middle class married life in the decades surrounding World War II. Connell tells the story of India Bridge in 117 short chapters, each a spare vignette of her enervated life in the perfectly manicured "country-club district" of an affluent Kansas City suburb. Linear in its narrative and meticulously realistic in its style, "Mrs. Bridge" follows India's life from marriage, to the birth of three children, to the rejection by those children of the repressed life of their parents as they grow into adults, to lonely suburban widowhood. While it is, at its heart, a grim tale of one woman's life of repression and, ultimately, loneliness and resignation, Connell's flawless and restrained narrative ultimately leaves the reader feeling exhilarated at the sheer literary achievement of "Mrs. Bridge".
Ostensibly the story of a marriage, Mr. Bridge is noticeably absent from much of the narrative. A successful lawyer, he is a man who is unable to express love or affection for his wife or his children, a man who is focussed on becoming "rich and successful," the epitome of the status-conscious husband and father whose identity lies in material possessions. "The family saw very little of him. It was not unusual for an entire week to pass without any of the children seeing him. On Sunday morning they would come downstairs and he . . . greeted them pleasantly and they responded deferentially, and a little wistfully because they missed him. Sensing this, he would redouble his efforts at the office in order to give them everything they wanted."
Mrs. Bridge, too, is powerfully repressed, unable to articulate her feelings of dissatisfaction, a woman who is beholden to the expectations of respectability and obsessed with appearances. "She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others." Thus, she ultimately drives all three of her children from her life, her unthinking obeisance to social convention destroying any thread of relationship that she might have had with them. Her oldest daughter, "curiously dark", flees to New York City, where she pursues her more unconventional dreams. Her second daughter, an accomplished golfer, enters an ill-fated marriage with a college dropout who cannot provide the country club life that she has been weaned to expect. Her son joins the army, asserting an act of individuality that Mrs. Bridge never seems able to accept or reconcile.
It is, most notably, however, in her relationships with her peers-with the other affluent housewives of the "country-club district"-that the grim and vapid nature of Mrs. Bridge's life becomes most apparent. In particular, her friend Grace Barron becomes a kind of outward manifestation of India Bridge's discontent, someone who lives a life of equal desperation, but not so quietly as Mrs. Bridge. Grace Barron "was a puzzle and was disturbing" to Mrs. Bridge. Why? Because she actually questioned the life she led, moving outside the banal, the conventional, if only in her discourse. As Grace once said to Mrs. Bridge: "India, I've never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything. I don't know how other people live, or think, even how they believe. Are we right? Do we believe the right things?"
Unlike Mrs. Bridge, who talked of "antique silver, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, the price of margarine as compared to butter, or what the hemline was expected to do," Grace Barron talked of "art, politics, astronomy, literature." Ultimately, Grace cannot cope with the ennui, the claustrophobia of her life, and she does what Mrs. Bridge ultimately lacks the fortitude to do; in a sense, Grace is a sort of "double" who acts out the dark alternative to Mrs. Bridge's repression. And when Grace does act, all that comes to Mrs. Bridge's mind is something Grace once said to her: "Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale-the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?"

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

A. Smith

Vintage

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 9, 2013

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This is vintage writing at its best! Good grammar, clear sentences and a story set in 30s America that is a wonderful insight into the social history of that era. I didn't think I would like Mrs Bridge as a character but by the end of the book I thought she was a very strong woman considering the era she lived in. I bought the book because it was recommended by Private Eye literary column and it is very rarely that they recommend a book. Well worth a read.

Jill Bowden

Mrs. Bridge - American novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 28, 2013

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I found it rather boring and repetitive, but kept on reading thinking it was leading somewhere which it did not. I found the ending rather abrupt.

carilynp

Capturing a time and place so well

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2018

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Written in 1959, Evan S. Connell’s novel MRS. BRIDGE tells the story about a well-to-do family living in Kansas City. It’s a glimpse into the daily goings on of Mrs. Bridge, her three children, and her busy at work attorney husband, who, while he seemingly adores her, showering her with lavish gifts upon her birthday each year, is absent and does not shower her with the affection she seems to crave. We see Harriet, their African American housekeeper, who is relegated to the kitchen and not treated with the respect that she deserves, nor is the next-door neighbor’s gardener’s daughter who regularly comes over to play with one of their daughters. Pre-Civil Rights sentiments are glaringly obvious in the Bridges’ household and among their country club set.
The the book is that it is indicative of the time and of the social strata. It is almost written like a diary. Daily events are jotted down. A glimpse of Mrs. Bridge’s thoughts and activities are recorded as are her longings, her feelings as a wife and a mother.
The book is poignant, funny, evocative, capturing a time and place so well.

18 people found this helpful

Ginger B.

Delicately Laced with Symbolism and Nuance

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2017

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Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell is a collection of discrete vignettes that chronical the life of India Bridge, the wife of a prosperous Kansas City attorney and mother of his three children in the 1930s. Mrs. Bridge is a novel that is delicately laced with symbolism and nuance but has no central plot or arc, instead it relies on exquisite refracted observations that are presented in 117 short vignettes each of them one to three pages long. The title, Mrs. Bridge, (an example of the subtle symbolism) references India Bridge’s transition to her life as the married appendage of her husband, a signifier that her roles as wife and mother supersede her individuality – she is ever the good girl/the good wife/ the good mother, and tries mightily to embrace the prescribed social persona and roles given to women of her time and status. She sees and defines herself so much through the lens of other people’s expectations of her that she hardly knows what she likes or wants or believes. For me, the most poignant moments in the book depict instances when she experiences an awareness of those personal vacancies and gets glimmerings that she’s missed out on something profound. As her children grow and leave home, and her husband works long hours to give her material security and then dies, she finds that living solely for others has impoverished both her own life and what she had to give to her relationships. She’s left alone with a vast and aimless emptiness at the end of her life.

33 people found this helpful

C. J. Edwards

Nostagia At Its Best

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 29, 2020

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I loved this book. From the start, I found myself thinking that Mrs. Bridge could have been my paternal grandmother. Even something my grandmother once said to me was said by Mrs. Bridge to one of her daughters. Told in 117 short chapters, it covers life in the 30's, although it could have taken place in the 50's. Mrs. Bridge followed social conventions of the day trying to be a perfect wife and mother and once her children left home, realized that she really didn't have a life to speak of. The prose was a pleasure to read and there is a dark sense of humor that made me laugh during certain vignettes when it might have been more appropriate to cry. Family dynamics are well covered throughout and it had such a sense of nostalgia to me, from the food and furnishings, what was served at card parties, conventions of dress, and what was expected of people. Nostalgia at its best.

10 people found this helpful

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Mrs. Bridge Paperback – Jan. 5 2010

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Evan S. Connell

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