Mr. Bridge. Paperback - 1983

London, UK Sinclair Browne, 1983. Paperback First Ed UK, so stated. Very Near Fine in Wraps: shows only the most minute indications of use: just a hint of toning to the extremities of the panels; mildest rubbing; a small, eighth-inch deep ding at the bottom edge of the text block affects about thirty pages. Binding square and secure; text clean. Certainly unread; remains very close to 'As New'. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 367pp. First Edition Thus in the UK, so stated. Published simultaneously with the Hardcover edition. First published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf in 1969. Trade Paperback. Both Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, which preceeded Mr. Bridge by ten years, are great books. Period. If you want character development, poetic moments, insight, a portrait of a certain time and place, these two books cannot be beat. The Bridges are petty, refined, bigoted, caring, aloof, devoted, rich, yet simple people. In a sense it is almost impossible to review one without the other. Significantly, both books start off with the wooing and the marriage. It is as if the books' titles signify not only who are the main characters, but what they are. Both characters define themselves by their spouse, and, de facto, all we know, or need to know, about them revolves around their married personae. The only thing more important to the couple than each other seems to be what others think of them. In Mrs. Bridge it is phrased this way: `She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others.' Accordingly, these are not standard novels. There are no great, overreaching themes. They are more like `blackout sketches'. Yet, each sketch is sort of like a minor point in the characters' lives, and each point paints a mere portion of the canvas. In this way I am reminded of the Pointillist style of painting. In both books we get essentially the same portraits of the two main characters, albeit slightly parallaxed. Mrs. Bridge is a feeler and Mr. Bridge a thinker. She realizes, at some level, the emptiness of their existence. He does not, at least not as deeply....Yet, Connell does not condescend to his characters; he deeply respects and takes them seriously, warts and all. Mr. Bridge thinks very ill of both blacks and Jews, as does his wife (to a lesser degree), yet is shown doing acts of kindness and charity for individual blacks and Jews. Then, he turns around and questions the motives of a lynching victim, and that of the first black girl who wants to pledge at Carolyn's sorority, or reacts queasily to the very presence of a Jewish investor, and wonders if Hitler was all bad, and not in the purest philosophic sense. Similarly, in her book, Mrs. Bridge has many moments of fine and of less admirable personal traits exposed: She is curiously fond of a young black girl who is friends of the children, she is utterly clueless as to the world of male bullying, she is scandalized at the thought of a dramatic presentation of Tobacco Road coming to town, and she floats through Europe until the Nazis invade Poland. Perhaps her defining moment comes when she discovers Douglas is looking at a dirty magazine, by going through his clothes while getting the laundry ready. He discovers her snooping: `He had followed her across the room and was now standing on the opposite side of the desk with his fists clenched behind his back. Seeing him so tense she thought that if she could only manage to rumple his hair as she used to do when he was a small boy everything would be all right. Calmly, and a little slyly, she began easing toward him.Seeing that she was after him he also moved to keep the desk between them.' Poetry in Connell's fiction is attained by the juxtaposition of the singularly beautiful momentwith another scene of singular beauty. Yet, these moments, these points, alone give no insight, but arrayed in their respective clusters, then played off of each other in both books, they form two brilliant portraits, whose conclusions are excellent. Her book ends with mundane torture and his with continued delusion- fitting purgatories for both. Evan S. Connell restores faith in the way things should be in good art. Connell takes innately dull material, and weaves intimately exciting portraits by what he focuses on, and how. These two books are aptly deserving of the appellation 'great'. Damn, it feels good to write that!