Until last year I'd heard nothing, at least that I can remember, about Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge (1959). It was his first novel and a bestseller. But, in a writing life that generated 18 books, he didn't build on his early success. A New York Times obituary (he died in 2013) suggests it was because he worked in various genres, whatever piqued his interest, without perfecting any one thing. His first book was a short story collection. He waited perhaps too long to write a sequel to his breakthrough, Mr. Bridge, that could fully capitalize on it. Another bestseller came decades later. It was a history book, Custer's Last Stand. He'd had trouble finding a publisher and its popularity caught everyone by surprise. He wrote a biography of the painter Francisco Goya. And, through it all, he didn't seek the spotlight or positions of authority. He took odd jobs to pay the rent while he wrote and researched.
The novel, his most celebrated work, doesn't have any sort of hook to grab the reader. There's no plot. The language is unadorned. It's average in length. The title is forgettable. (I mistakenly wrote "Bridges" throughout my notes, like the last name of the Charlotte Hornets basketball player.) His main character is a sheltered, privileged housewife who makes a virtue of normality, doesn't do anything in particular that'd stand out, and doesn't once manage to examine herself very closely. It can almost seem designed to get lost among other books. All it needs is a beige dust jacket. As I read I thought of Richard Linklater's film Boyhood. The director once explained that, in depicting his subject, he chose unexceptional micromoments over big dramatic moments. The hook is that he filmed little by little over a period of years to correspond with the story's passage of time, enabling viewers to see the actors age naturally, along with their characters. It's about three hours long. I stopped watching after about two. Stitching together those unexceptional micromoments across an entire work is hard to pull off. Real can mean true but insipid, forgotten or abstracted for good reason.
What did I do today? There's an accurate, socially acceptable answer to the question that can persuade someone to never ask again.
The difference between the novel and the movie is that Connell chooses his micromoments better. Initially I wasn't sure he had. In over a hundred brief, titled chapters, it ranges from the start of Mrs. Bridge's marriage to after the death of her husband. Though it's not stated outright, it's her most baffling kid, the youngest, her son Douglas, that narrates in third-person. And the first third or so of the book is noticeably heavy on chapters that amount to a series of complaints. Mrs. Bridge, you see, is a nag. Take your elbow off the table. Don't put too much gravy on your mashed potatoes. You sit in your seat weird. You used the guest towels in the bathroom (towels that no one uses, not even her, because they're too nice). She sincerely can't understand why a kid would be messy, silly, unruly. Eventually, as one skirmish followed another and another, I paused and wondered if this would be the whole book, if Connell had written prosecutorial or revenge fiction, keenly observed from within, no shortcoming or mistake left unrevealed. And, given the trivial nature of the complaints, I hesitated to continue.
But I'm glad I did. Right where my doubts arose, the book begins to exhibit a more mature outlook, shifts in tone and emphasis gracefully, then does so again and again: sympathy for Mrs. Bridge's loneliness, gentle amusement tinged with sadness about her struggles to find something to do, loving frustration with her inability to probe the mysteries of her family. As I kept reading, I came to admire what Connell does in that first third, acknowledging - at the risk of overdoing it, to achieve the proper aggravating effect - a common aspect of having parents. One might be reluctant to say it out loud except behind closed doors to siblings and maybe close friends for fear of seeming unappreciative and disloyal: that daily dose of annoyance. Sometimes, as the adult making rules and enforcing them, annoying the children (and being annoyed by them, for that matter) is unavoidable. Same goes for sharing a space with other people. However, there's also annoying behavior that they can avoid and never will, no matter how many times you sigh or go dead-eyed or let your soul take a seat somewhere while your body does whatever it's going to do, I'll catch you later. That's what you get for allowing yourself to be born. This is a truth Connell bravely and eloquently portrays. Can I eat in peace for once? Can I dry my hands on a towel that was made for that purpose? To escape mom's relentless nitpicking, Douglas wisely chooses the safest option, climbing higher up a tree.
(Oh, yours was a blissful family? Congratulations. Tell me: Where was your hiding spot? You fucking liar. I sort of understand, though. It's also worth acknowledging, for the sake of making an important distinction, those who'll read that previous paragraph and think: annoyance if you're lucky.)
One of the benefits of creating a book out of micromoments is that they're manifold, in two senses of the word, many and diverse. So Connell has the freedom to choose all kinds and, combined with his structure, goes further in fewer pages. There are chapters about how Mrs. Bridge parks a car and chapters about her polite racism, chapters about the state of her marriage and chapters about the dullards in her social circle, chapters that are like those immortal in-joke stories repeated through the years and chapters with revelations handled delicately by a son who cares deeply for the woman who raised him. (And Connell makes use of what he doesn't write about too. Silence, absence.) Right now I'm reading a book written, to some extent, from a distance. Certain passages are dutifully supported by broad details that can be gathered by doing homework but, on the everyday and human levels, they turn vague, all-purpose. Connell's book contains strangeness, the kind of strangeness that's lived, not invented. And it takes place in Kansas City and is clearly written from Kansas City, which brings the reader closer to it. For instance: Douglas discovers abandoned building materials in a vacant lot. He decides what he must do is spend a significant chunk of time and energy painstakingly turning it into an immoveable tower of garbage. It eventually gets taller than the surrounding fencing. Neighbors whisper. It's not hurting anyone and yet his mother finds it unseemly and feels the need to step in. Then, from the mind of a fixture: "The next morning as soon as Douglas left for school she telephoned the fire department. Everyone called the fire department when there was a problem that defied classification."
The word I scribbled between chapters, the first word I thought of upon finishing was completion. The reader gets a complete portrait of an individual and a family. Or maybe living, breathing photo album in prose would be more apt. Connell's feat is the best hook I can come up with: Mrs. Bridge is a novel about the unexamined, unspectacular life that works - and works beautifully.
