I can’t begin to express how funny this novel is. It doesn’t seem like it should be and if your parent also rented the Paul Newman/Joanna Woodward version of the film in the early 1990s, I don’t think that will do much to prove it. But it’s really funny.
So the novel begins with a page and half chapter relating the meeting, courtship, and marriage of Mr and Mrs Bridge in the early 1920s. Within a page or two more they have first one, then two, and then a third child–two older girls and a boy named Douglas.
The novel then spends a page, two pages, and sometimes a little more in successive 115 chapters each detailing some small event, part of the marriage, detail here or there, or events that cover the next 30 or so years in the marriage. Mrs Bridge is a earnest, if naive, and political neuter person who defers to her husband’s (and the country’s wider) conservatism in all manners. She’s not hateful and she’s not treated with disdain, just allowed to plod forth here and there with small social and emotional misadventures. I can’t really explain any of the scenes, because they won’t really mean or add up to much. But the novel very clearly spells out a life.
The star of the show however is definitely Douglass, the boyest boy to ever boy. He’s not good, but not quite bad. He hates being told, anything, and he’s always up to something, and he cannot be stopped.
Mr. Bridge —
This sequel to Mrs. Bridge came out some ten years ago and is about 100 pages longer than the first book. While the first book is brilliant in its own way, this one takes it to a completely different depth of analysis. Mr. Bridge, husband to Mrs. Bridge, is so prototypical as a Conservative American man, whose inner depths have kind of been plumbed before, but the difference here is something altogether more. Like the first book, this one is absolutely hilarious. There’s one chapter that made me laugh so hard just on the opening sentence that I took a picture of it and sent it to my wife who also recently read the book and we laughed so much at it.
The humor in the first book comes from Mrs. Bridge’s inability to fully engage with the world because of her slightly out of touch emotions. Mr. Bridge has a more clear picture of who and what he is, but he’s so detached from feeling and emotion that he barely reacts to almost anything and certainly cannot emote with almost any kind of openness and literacy in his feelings. He feels, but he can’t really explain those feelings. If Mrs. Bridge could be potentially read as an attack on American domestic middle class femininity it’s certainly balanced by this look. Mr. Bridge has almost no inner life left to speak of outside of his sense of duty to family, his sense of fairness in the world (he’s almost a lampoon in a way of Atticus Finch), and his catalog of conservative ideology.
But once again, the star of the show is the son Douglas who somehow might be the funniest character I’ve ever read.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Bridge-Evan-S-Connell/dp/1582435685/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mrs+bridge&qid=1574610784&sr=8-1)