This past week, I stopped reading two books. Since identity is often determined as much by dislikes as by likes, it seems worthwhile to consider these aborted books.
You’ll remember that a couple weeks back I read Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. I thought I would complete the set and read Mr. Bridge, published 10 years later. Like Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge is composed of short chapters with witty titles, and, like Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge is plotless as far as I could tell. I read 170 pages of an edition with 367 pages total, 46% of the book. This was enough to tell me that in its overall aim, Mr. Bridge seems very much like Mrs. Bridge, except for the difference that Mr. Bridge’s life is a little more public and exterior than Mrs. Bridge’s—after all, he’s the one who makes money and makes decisions. Perhaps this explains the increased amount of dialogue in Mr. Bridge, which is not as strong a suit for Connell as his ability to narrate slightly odd yet wholly lifelike scenarios, the technique that dominates Mrs. Bridge. Still, because he is more in the public arena and yet like his wife in many ways, Mr. Bridge comes across as bigoted when he takes those limitations into the public sphere rather than burying them in the private sphere, as Mrs. Bridge does.
