Mrs. Bridge lacks a traditional narrative arc or really any plot to speak of. Instead, Connell gives us some hundred-odd brief vignettes, each detailing a trivial, everyday occurrence in the life of its eponymous protagonist, an extremely sheltered Kansas City housewife. These sketches build upon and relate to one another, giving a sense of how meaning arises (or, tragically, fails to arise) from the small events of Mrs.Bridge's life. Mordantly funny, moving, and -- despite its absence of dramatic events -- compulsively readable.
— Matthew
Despite the fact that the publishers have given this book a terribly midleading cover designed to scream Here Is A Lady Book for Ladies, they are way off. They're off because here in Mrs Bridge you will find something like the meeting point of Jenny Offill, William Gass and Richard Yates, a nearly plotless masterpiece of the American domestic. Short vignettes detail the day-to-day of Mrs Bridge, a 1930's housewife in Kansas City, who lives a life both small and profound. It is funny, moving, and compulsively readable, despite the godawful cover.
— Madeleine
Description
"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.
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.
Praise For…
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
