It has 117 chapters, some of them only two or three paragraphs long.

I think this is why it appeals so much to writers: it doesn’t feel “written” so much as effortlessly breathed onto the page. Without feeling in the slightest bit ponderous, it takes on the weight of tragedy. Bridge becomes, almost imperceptibly, deeply sympathetic. And yet by the end of its 240 pages, Connell achieves something damn near impossible: his satiric portrait of Mrs. If you think of plot in the conventional Big Event sense, almost nothing happens in the book. She’s classist, racist, and obsessed with conformity and the superficial details of propriety. Bridge-her first name, India, is mentioned in the very first sentence and then rarely referred to again-is the matriarch of an upper-middle-class Kansas City family in the 1930s. Connell’s comedy of Midwestern manners, I recognized my mother. “They’re Malaysian,” my mother said, with a hint of condescension.Īs soon as I started reading MRS. “Those don’t look like ferns,” the neighbor reportedly said. But my mother bought into it wholeheartedly, and according to my sister even gave a spirited defense of their fern-ness when a neighbor spotted the enormous plants from our swimming pool. More specifically, the pot plants my older brother grew on his windowsill all summer, when he was a weed-dealing teenager, and which he told my Wisconsinite mother were “Malaysian ferns.” Even I, an unworldly eight-year-old, could tell they weren’t ferns. I forget who urged me to read it first-I remember a classmate in grad school raving about it-but my near-instant infatuation with the book had to do with marijuana. BRIDGE is one of those books that writers love to pass along to other writers, although there’s nothing difficult or “writerly” about it: it’s funny, even hilarious, and written in fleet, nimble, sparely elegant prose.

Novel mrs bridge