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.
The book’s very short chapters follow Mr. Bridge as he goes about his days. His daily activities are themselves dull—dropping off a car at the mechanic, checking up on a safe-deposit box, meeting with friends to fulfill a weekly lunch date, having dinner with the family, preparing an evening drink—and descriptions of them are deliberately antiseptic, however vivid. Though there are breathtaking renderings of setting, these seem to occur from without—that is, once we are placed in Mr. Bridge’s immediate presence Connell’s writing becomes terse, as if we have entered the mind of someone who uses language only as a means of message-transmission, someone who is hyper-rational but inarticulate.
In our literary imagination, there seems to be an obdurate unwillingness to forgive lives that are similar to Mr. Bridge’s. I’ve seen equally conventional lives torn to shreds in the pages of postwar fiction, lives that I feel like I’m never permitted to view as anything but perverse. And while Mr. Bridge is certainly not uncritical, it accomplishes something much more subtle than outright critique: It teaches one (it taught me, at least) to love someone who is alien and remains alien, rather than someone who, previously alien, transgresses convention in order to become tragically familiar. Mr. Bridge’s tragedy is much quieter.
Published in 1969, as the deafening frenzy of ’60s counterculture was beginning to calm, Mr. Bridge can’t help but feel informed by the eventual failure of a creaky, Mr. Bridge-like value system to publicly predominate in the second half of the century. This failure, though not a misfortune for Connell and his readers, claims Mr. Bridge as its casualty. (We get an inkling of what this collision of values looks like when Mr. Bridge visits his aspiring bohemian daughter Ruth in New York. It’s not favorable.) I left the book in no way worried about Mr. Bridge’s ability to insulate himself from an unprecedentedly prominent counterculture, but I did leave feeling that, despite his host of pathologies and his near-autistic reactions to profusions of female emotion, I love Mr. Bridge dearly.
