I’d never heard of Evan S. Connell but came across him in the writings of James Salter, who lauded him as one of the note-worthy authors of the 20th century. That brought me to read Mrs. Bridge: the 117 anecdotes of a 1930’s midwest housewife over the decades of her staid, suppressed life. One’s life is the accumulation of moments--the years and decades fade and blur but certain memories persist and these often innocuous details are what Connell captures as Mrs. Bridge raises her children and dutifully fulfills her part in the Kansas City country club set.
With a careful eye and razor sharp bite, Connell captures a period in American history for the well-heeled social strata decades before the sexual revolution, feminism, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement. The reader will see the slowly building revolt bubbling beneath the surface in subtle ways. Take for example when Mrs. Bridge spies a book called “Theory of the Leisure Class” in a bookstore: “She experienced a surge of resentment. For a number of seconds she eyed this book with definite hostility, as though it were alive and conscious of her. She went inside and asked to see the book. With her gloves on it was difficult to turn the pages, so she handed it back to the clerk, thanked him, and with a dissatisfied expression continued to Bancroft’s.” “With her gloves it was difficult to turn the pages”--what an exquisite detail to document--the suppressed wealthy housewife can’t even browse a critique of her social class because she wears gloves when she goes out.
But ultimately, Mrs. Bridge is a story about one woman’s loneliness and the ubiquitous search for love and meaning and identity (after all she’s not even identified by her first name in the book’s title) amidst a life dedicated to outward service to family, husband, and the expectations of her friends. It’s a melancholy story as her children grow older and her husband prioritizes his work: “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.”
Today we’d probably call what she’s experiencing depression as she’s paralyzed with fear of a colorless future:
She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed. So it was that her thoughts now and then turned deviously deeper, spiraling down and down in search of the final recess, of life more immutable than the life she had bequeathed in the birth of her children.
Perhaps the most fitting line from the novel comes from a conversation between Mrs. Bridge and a Russo-Italian countess who’d lived a life filled with escape, intrigue, and adventure: “To be afraid is, I tell you, Madame, the most terrible thing in the world.” There is a fear in the mundane, the daily repetition, the rising and falling of each day that grows more prevalent in a life void of God, or deep friendships, or abiding love. Connell has realized this fear and imprisoned it in the life of Mrs. Bridge as told in 117 moments.
Key References (for further study):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/02/overlooked-classics-mrs-bridge-evan-s-connell
Key Quotes:
He spoke of Ruskin and of Robert Ingersoll, and he read to her that evening on the porch, later, some verses from The Rubáiyát
Location: 124
This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.
Location: 272
“You should say the cleaning ‘woman.’ A lady is someone like Mrs. Arlen or Mrs. Montgomery.”
Location: 630
feel like those bells,” said Grace. “Why are they turning around, India? Why? Because the candle has been lighted. What I want to say is—oh, I don’t know. It’s just that the orbit is so small.”
Location: 1,248
“There was a young maid from Madras, who had a magnificent ass; not rounded and pink, as you probably think—it was gray, had long ears, and ate grass.”
Location: 1,259
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.
Location: 1,263
Theory of the Leisure Class. She experienced a surge of resentment. For a number of seconds she eyed this book with definite hostility, as though it were alive and conscious of her. She went inside and asked to see the book. With her gloves on it was difficult to turn the pages, so she handed it back to the clerk, thanked him, and with a dissatisfied expression continued to Bancroft’s.
Location: 1,291
This book came to her like an olive branch. It assured her of God’s love for man, of man’s love of God: in the ever-lengthening shadow of Hitler and Mussolini her faith was restored, and the comfortable meditations of her minister found lodging.
Location: 1,416
She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed. So it was that her thoughts now and then turned deviously deeper, spiraling down and down in search of the final recess, of life more immutable than the life she had bequeathed in the birth of her children.
Location: 1,452
“To be afraid is, I tell you, Madame, the most terrible thing in the world.”Location: 2,092
Once on the train Ruth kicked off her shoes and curled up in the seat. She unsnapped the catch of her traveling bag and reached in for a copy of Theatre Arts but felt a strange envelope. She knew immediately what it was—it was called a “train letter,” and a generation or so ago they were given to young people who were leaving home for the first time.
Location: 2,173
She had been brought up to believe without question that when a woman married she was married for the rest of her life and was meant to remain with her husband wherever he was, and under all circumstances, unless he directed her otherwise. She wished he would not be so obstinate; she wished he would behave like everyone else, but she was not particularly frightened. For nearly a quarter of a century she had done as he told her, and what he had said would happen had indeed come to pass, and what he had said would not occur had not occurred. Why, then, should she not believe him now?
Location: 2,505
it true the Italian women get awfully heavy?” “Yes, we saw some who were positively enormous. I suppose it’s from eating so much starch.”
Location: 2,660
The girl was a gypsy-looking business with stringy black uncombed hair, hairy brown arms jingling with bracelets, and glittering mascaraed eyes in which there was a look of deadly experience.
Location: 2,894
With Ruth gone and with Carolyn at home only an occasional week end, with Mr. Bridge continuing to spend long hours at the office, and with Douglas appearing only for meals, Mrs. Bridge found the days growing interminable; she could not remember when a day had seemed so long since the infinite hours of childhood, and so she began casting about rueful and disconsolate for some way to occupy the time. There were mornings when she lay in bed wide awake until noon, afraid to get up because there was nothing to do. She knew Harriet would take care of ordering the groceries, Harriet would take care of everything. Harriet somehow was running the house and Mrs. Bridge had the dismal sensation of knowing that she, herself, could leave town for a week and perhaps no one would get overly excited. At breakfast—lunch if she chose to call it so—she would consider the newspaper with sober apathy, sighing at the events in Europe, lethargically eating whatever Harriet prepared—toast and orange juice, chipped beef and cinnamon rolls, fruit salad, bacon and tomato sandwich, a dish of sherbet; whatever it happened to be Mrs. Bridge would eat some of it though it seemed tasteless. Summer had come again, another summer, another year.
Location: 2,912
Could she explain how the leisure of her life—that exquisite idleness he had created by giving her everything—was driving her insane?
Location: 2,967
have always observed a singular accord between super-celestial ideas and subterranean behavior.
Location: 2,971
Over the wisdom of Montaigne she brooded, eventually reaching the conclusion that if super-celestial ideas were necessarily accompanied by subterranean behavior it might be better to forego them both.
Location: 3,315
“Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?”
Location: 3,512
But the pictures to which she returned most often for her own pleasure were those of her family: they evoked what she had known most intimately, and all she had loved most profoundly.
Location: 3,569
Son of the Morning Star, his extraordinary narrative and rumination on George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the marvelous account of the Crusades, Deus Lo Volt, that should have been a bestseller, but he has remained a somewhat isolate figure, despite his singular novels and stories, monastic and less known than writers who are his inferiors. “Rejection and lost illusions” he once summarized his experiences as a writer, but he also has had courage and endurance. The illusions may remain lost, but in view of the fifty years during which countless other books, applauded at the time, have faded or disappeared and Mrs. Bridge continues to be read—rejection must be considered an exaggeration.
The apartment building that we lived in during Covid had a community library of sorts on the garage level. Stocked by the hundreds of residents, the three shelves carried a rotating assortment of fiction, self-help books, partisan political tomes, and biographies. It was there that I picked up The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. I'd heard of this fairly prolific Turkish writer but I'd never read anything by him other than leafing through his well-reviewed Snow at a bookstore once. 
The name of this 1949 memoir was taken from the English poet John Donne’s poem of the same title: “Death Be Not Proud.” In it the author and father John Gunther recounts the life and death of his son who passed after a struggle with a malignant brain tumor. Much as Donne pushes back against death’s supposed power, so does Gunther as he celebrates the vitality and beauty of his son Johnny’s life saying that the book’s purpose was for him “to write, as a mournful tribute not only to Johnny but to the power, the wealth, the unconquerable beauty of the human spirit, will, and soul.” The book’s power comes from the author’s keen power of observation coupled with a very measured, controlled level of sentimentality. A good example comes in retrospect as Gunther considers what it means that Johnny is gone: “All the wonderful things in life are so simple that one is not aware of their wonder until they are beyond touch.” 
by Nicoloas Bouvier.
by Beatrix Beck
I
Early on Gawande captures the decision that we will all make (ideally) before we grow old: “how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves anymore.” More specifically, he seeks to find out “how [can] people age without having to choose between neglect and institutionalization?” Notably, he acknowledges that the challenge to answering these questions is largely a structural one: “How can we build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives” instead of the current medical status quo and culture that is is built on chasing the long shot--the “medical equivalent of lottery tickets”--on treatments that likely won’t work but near nothing on preparing the patients for the certainty that the treatments won’t work. Most frightening is his conclusion that for the majority of the medical community “hope is not a plan, but it is our plan.”
