A Bridge to Somewhere (mostly unpleasant)

Here’s a unique novel structure. Evan Connell, Jr., wrote two novels, Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969), set in 1930s Kansas City, the same family, the same marriage, the same events, but from the two different point of views, apparently to much acclaim at the time. As a unique novel reading experience, I read both of them simultaneously as overlapping waves, fifty pages nominally in one, and fifty in the other. What fun! Apparently, as a learned at a Memorial Day back yard dinner at the neighbors, movies have been based on the novels.

I’m not sure I could stomach the movies. If you take Ward and June Cleaver, and stiffen them for a generation or two prior, you’d approximate Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Like most novels worthy of their readers, you can’t help but eagerly turn the pages of Connell’s books, even though you know it’s not going to end badly or well. Clearly, there’s going to be no end at all to the narrow, early suburban lives of these affluent, politically, and socially conservative Americans. Every page is a turn of the torture machine crank, the ring of an old grandfather clock marking off yet another interminable hour in the silent, suffering,pathetic destiny for this stripe of America.

In some ways, it’s a different form of muckraking journalism in novel form – I’m thinking of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – showing us how the American “free market” caste system works, but in this case from the top down, not the bottom up.

What kept me reading these 600+ pages over a three-day weekend? Always hard to capture, but here’s what I think:

You can read the Bridge novels as a diatribe against prejudice and racism (the poor, blacks, Jews, Italians, gays, women, are all victims), a portrayal of capitalism vs socialism and the New Deal, the vices of classism, and lots of other -isms. You can read the Bridge novels as an indictment of the institution of traditional marriage with traditional gender roles. You can even read the Bridge novels as a damning inability of a couple to recognize, communicate about, and resolve their issues. You can probably guess that all issues faced by this couple are swept under the rug, which in a figurative sense, is the only thing “left standing” by the end.

I think what kept me going, although I hadn’t realized it until I was close to finished, is how all of us (certainly all Americans, maybe everyone), if we are able and willing to listen to the tape recorder in our heads (the one that no one can hear), suffer from/with all of the afflictions and ailments presented through this couple. Even if we think we “aren’t like that,” we are victims of parents, teachers, community leaders, and significant others who “are like that,” or were. I don’t mean just the negative (and what may come across today as stereotypical) traits of the Bridges’ (e.g., prejudice, stubbornness) but the positive ones too (work ethic,  loyalty, ambition). Society as a whole has a rate of change but we as individuals have our own rate of change. We aren’t always as enlightened as we wish to believe.

It’s fascinating that Mrs. Bridge came first. I think it’s easy to see it was a bit more difficult for the author to let Mrs. Bridge become her own character, than Mr. Bridge. The “Missus” gets one hundred fewer pages, too. I also wonder if Connell was projecting the rebellious nature of the 1960s onto his 1930s characters (especially the children), but then I realized that the large social trends often begin with the the affluent, leisure classes.

One thing’s for sure: Mrs. Bridge ends with the most heartbreaking scene imaginable. I can’t think of an ending that so embodies not only the character portrayed but indeed the oppression of the social “system” as a whole over the individual.

These are novels well worth reading, even if the experience resembles taking medicine that’s tastes awful but is good for you.