Mrs Bridge
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the classic American novels of the twentieth century.
Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.
The companion novel Mr Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the marriage, is also available in Penguin Modern Classics.
'A perfect novel ... Its tone - knowing, droll, plaintive, shuttling rapidly between pain and hilarity - elevates it to its own kind of specialness ... One of those books that can suffuse a room with happiness when someone brings it up' Meg Wulitzer, The New York Times
'Intimate ... affecting ... a very funny book' Joshua Ferris
Customer Reviews
With the best will in the world
I increasingly loved and respected this novel, which surprises and often amuses you in small chapters, but also pictures the bigger timeline of Mrs Bridge’s married life.She as the main character impressed me marvellously with her everlasting good will and best efforts to do well and keep people happy !! Her being a little stuck in old fashioned opinions aside…The novel is very strong in showing short social interactions including dialogue and one can learn endlessly from Mrs.Bridge’s politeness and diplomacy. However it also seems, that she loses out more and more on truly close relationships, as all her three children are aiming away from her, becoming quite alienated along the way and furthermore she seems too focused on keeping appearances up with friends. Her husband seems devoted to the marriage mainly by working hard and providing a wealthy lifestyle, but does not actually spend much time with her at all. So it comes down to one woman out of her circle of “High end Ladies” to be more of a confidante, but mostly in the sense that Mrs Bridge understands the mental turmoil this Grace Barron finds herself in, not the other way round. (The circle contains some very original personage, as the whole of Kansas City seems to do)
Tragic is the loneliness at retirement age, and all aspects of this are masterly brought on the page, as the author can evoke dread and desaster whilst at the same time being comical (exemplified in the very last scene, where Mrs Bridge has managed to imprison herself in her beloved luxury car, helplessly shouting out for human contact)
So it comes to pass, that such a completely well meaning person ultimately gets “hollowed out” by disappointment and a broad sense of BEWILDERMENT with life and especially people ! It made me emotional in sympathy and recognition and I am sure to read the novel all over again.