Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubOctober 27th, 2009
Daniel Pearce: The Last Book I Loved, Mr. Bridge
Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge—a companion piece to his earlier novel, Mrs. Bridge—offers a rare sort of company. And it’s unexpected company: Its protagonist, after all, is a tacitly-but-virulently xenophobic, politically conservative, emotionally acerbic lawyer living in Kansas City during the prohibition, all qualities that should make Mr. Bridge patently unrelatable and unlovable to almost anyone who would bother to read Connell’s writing in the first place.
Not that being relatable and lovable should be a novelist’s invariable goal for her characters, but in Mr. Bridge’s unique case it becomes remarkably difficult to disentangle a love for the man and a love for the book that contains him. …more
