S.G. Talmor

It has happened to me to be deeply moved by a book without being able, at first, to say why. Mrs Bridge belongs to that category. It is not a novel driven by events, nor by a final revelation. It tightens the chest very early on, almost immediately, even though nothing seems to be happening. And that initial unease only deepens, without ever resolving itself into a legible drama.

The novel recounts the life of a woman from the American bourgeoisie: married, a mother, settled into a comfortable existence that is socially successful and perfectly conventional. Mrs Bridge does what is expected, when it is expected. She runs her household, raises her children, accompanies her husband, observes social customs. Nothing in this life appears, at first glance, to justify novelistic interest. There is no continuous plot, no psychological trajectory, no decisive crisis. The book is composed of a succession of very short chapters—often one or two pages, sometimes less—each centered on a detail, a situation, a remark, an ordinary moment.

A child comes home from school wearing a shirt he likes, but whose sleeves are frayed. Mrs Bridge wants to throw it away. “You’ll look poor,” she says. The child asks, “Why? Do you have something against poor people?” She pauses for a moment and replies, “But we are not poor.”
A Black child, the gardener’s daughter, plays with the children and sometimes stays for lunch. One day, Mrs Bridge gently tells her that her father must be waiting. The child understands immediately.
A friend commits suicide. Mrs Bridge is disturbed, without being able to give that disturbance any clear form.
She travels to Paris, looks, observes, then returns unchanged.
The children leave home. It is not a rupture, only the end of a function.
Her husband dies. It is neither a liberation nor a collapse, but the disappearance of a framework that had never been questioned.

I gave the book to my father. Halfway through, he blurted out, “It’s incredible—nothing happens in this book, and I can’t put it down.”

Many readers react negatively to this book. The judgments are often harsh. Mrs Bridge is seen as stupid, passive, lacking reflection, crossed by anxieties without an object. People speak of mediocrity, conformity, sometimes emptiness. Some readers feel pity, others disdain. Few speak of empathy. Many say they are relieved to close the book, reassured by the idea that this era is over. Some hope that reading Mr Bridge, written by the author ten years later, will provide an explanation, a counterpoint, a key that might compensate for this discomfort.

These reactions are not absurd. They are even understandable. But they share a common feature: they are strategies of defense. The book is assessed on the basis of what it does not offer—action, visible intelligence, awareness, revolt, explanation. The character is judged as one might judge a way of life, or a narrative promise that has not been fulfilled. Reading seeks to regain a comfortable position: to understand, to judge, to move beyond, to leave.

Ordinary literary criticism often works this way. It classifies, explains, contextualizes, interprets. It asks what the book “means,” what it “denounces,” what it “represents.” Mrs Bridge resists this kind of approach—not because it is obscure, but because it operates on a different level. The book asks for neither empathy nor identification nor indignation. It does not propose a thesis. It does not seek to save its character, nor to condemn her. It does something simpler and more radical: it looks.

Much has been said about Evan S. Connell’s subtle irony. It is real. The style is factual, restrained, precise. But reducing the novel to an exercise in irony seems to me insufficient. For it happens that books act independently—and sometimes in opposition—to their authors’ intentions. Once a writer truly fixes his gaze on a human being, something occurs that exceeds intention. The gaze is an act. It operates independently of any desire to comment, correct, or judge.

That is where my own relationship to this book lies. I was not moved by Mrs Bridge because she is admirable, nor because she is secretly more intelligent than she appears. I was not moved by an idea, nor by a demonstration. I was moved by the sheer existence of this woman, as she is seen. Human beings are very often caricatures to one another. We see roles, functions, social positions, expected behaviors—rarely people. Once a gaze stops filtering what it sees through judgment, something irreducible appears.

That gaze does not stop at dismantling illusions. It sees, of course, false constructions, fragile balances, blind spots. Mr Bridge, for instance, sees nothing. The children themselves sometimes formulate a cruel judgment about their mother’s life and say they would not want to live like her. One could stop there. But a gaze shaped by reading novels like this one goes further. It perceives, beyond ridicule and apparent inner poverty, the naked tragedy of human existence: beings desperately seeking their place, their balance, a minimal meaning, in a chaotic world that threatens them.

And that same gaze sometimes perceives, simultaneously, something like grace. Not redemption, not moral beauty, but presence. Bashō writes:

This same landscape
hears the song
and the death of the cicada.

Tragedy and grace do not exclude one another. They coexist.

It is this gaze that I tried to pass on to my students when I sometimes began writing workshops by reading Mrs Bridge. Not so that they would in turn write about a middle-class American woman of the 1930s, but so that they might learn to look differently. To transpose this gaze to other layers of contemporary society: an anorexic young woman raised in Dubai, dreaming of becoming a model and posting on Instagram, “What I love is Vuitton”; a man who has reached some social summit and could be a modern-day Ivan Ilyich; lives minor or dazzling, all engaged in the same effort to hold together.

It is easy to observe the human comedy, to mix these lives into a vast danse macabre, as in the Middle Ages, where the infant, the nobleman, and the cardinal danced together with skeletons. All are trying to find a place, or to maintain one at any cost, to give meaning to a fundamentally unstable life. We will not change people. The very nature of the novel is to dwell on the form a life takes—what we call, for lack of a better word, a destiny. But we can learn to look at them differently.

To move through life as a reader is not to become better. It is not to love more. It is simply to become a little more attentive. It is to be capable of suspending, if only for a moment, the judgment that confines others and confines us with them. Once that judgment falls silent, even briefly, a form of human fraternity appears. “This man does not know what he is doing,” Rimbaud writes. “He is an angel.”

Mrs Bridge is not a book one loves.
It is a book that teaches one how to see.