Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Jr. (Viking, 1959)

 

I found this book to be wrenchingly, almost punishingly, sad.  It details the life of Mrs. India Bridge, which is, by all external accounts a good life: she marries a successful, hardworking, and wealthy lawyer, lives in a beautiful home in a wealthy and exclusive suburb of Kansas City, has a maid to do all the cooking and cleaning , has three healthy children, lives a life of plenty (diamonds, trips to Europe, expensive cars), enjoys robust good health, and yet is always depressed, panicked, confused, bored.  She is a stranger to her mostly absent and tyrannical husband, an embarrassment to her children; even her friends seem to tolerate her with a combination of amusement and pity, for she is totally incapable of being honest or genuinely intimate with any of them.  One of her friends, Grace Barron, who shares Mrs. Bridge's existential anguish, is able to express her feelings of despair, but no one really listens or takes her pleas seriously, so she ends up killing herself.

Connell tells this story by relating small moments and incidents in a mosaic that is beautifully detailed and exquisite.  He is unsparingly brutal with all his characters, who all fail and punish one another in known and unknown ways.  There is no love in this book, at least no love that is successfully and directly expressed and acknowledged.

Is this a heartless exposure of the American Dream and the myth of the happy family?  Connell's tone is so cool and distant it's hard to know what he is thinking, or wants the reader to think.  If there are moments of love and warmth, he overlooks them, and works especially hard to find the moments of failure and mortification.  Mrs. Bridge, despite its gentle and polite tone, is a brutal and terribly sad book.

 

You've met her in your own town.

  She's seen often at card parties, P.T.A. meetings, and Country Club dances.

  You think you know her, but do you?