Connecting with "Mrs. Bridge"

The Fab 5 met tonight to discuss and dissect the life and times of Mrs. Bridge, the subject of the novel by the same name by Evan S. Connell published in 1959. This choice was my doing; I’ve been interested in reading the book for quite a while. Many years ago there was a Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward made-for-TV miniseries called Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (see photo to the right), based on this book and its companion, Mr. Bridge. I don’t remember being bowled over by it, other than I enjoyed seeing them act together, but I always wondered what the big deal was about the book. Since I’ve owned the book forever but haven’t taken time to read it, as I am wont to do I brought it to book club to inflict it on them so that I would read it too.

Mrs. Bridge is the wife of a wealthy lawyer and the mother of three children living the country club life in Kansas City just before World War II. Time is passing her by—her kids are getting older, the world is changing around her, but she stays just the same.

Tentative and polite to a fault, Mrs. Bridge (her real name is India, but she’s never felt it fits) has a complicated inner life, a life of quiet desperation, which rarely makes its way out of her brain. While she wishes to improve herself, she never can quite finish her projects--learning Spanish, doing charity work, improving her vocabulary.

World issues, politics, philosophy, art…all of these things interest her a bit, but she doesn’t feel qualified to offer opinions on any of them. She defers to her husband’s opinions, as well as his wishes on just about everything. She is uncomfortable with anything different, which includes people different from herself. Anyone of any noticeable ethnicity seems to be disturbing to her, in a ethnocentricity that goes beyond black/white race relations of the time.

She would’ve been a little concerned at the way we attacked the Mexican food we had for dinner. Far too ethnic, I think, and who knows what rules of good manners we were breaking, dipping our chips into take-out bowls of queso.

Mrs. Bridge is lonely and bored. She has everything she could ever want, including a maid to do all the domestic chores, but she has no one to feel really close to. Her husband works all hours to provide all the material goods they could want, but he offers no real companionship. Her children are rapidly outgrowing their desire to be anywhere near their old-fashioned and oddly unworldly mother. She has very limited ideas of everything, from manners to sexuality. When a friend commits suicide, she tells her grown children that the woman had eaten some tuna that had been left out overnight. When a cousin has a baby three months after her wedding, Mrs. Bridge mentions that first babies are so often premature. Since “appearances” are all that really matter to her, she never faces most of reality.

Sonya was so caught up in Mrs. Bridge that she immediately went out to buy Mr. Bridge and read it too. But of course we wouldn’t let her tell us about it, because we might read it too. Which made discussion rather difficult for poor Sonya tonight, because she couldn’t possibly discuss the book as if she were uninformed of Mr. Bridge’s side of the story.

We debated if Mrs. Bridge’s inability to do anything is because she is a product of her time or because her husband’s dismissive attitude made her to hesitant to make a move. In the end, though, it’s hard for a millennial woman to understand her. On the other hand, there are some very universal things, like the distance she feels from her children as they become independent adults. Or her fears about how the future is dark, that the world might just fall apart around her.

Connell’s writing is very unusual. Each chapter is a tiny scene in Mrs. Bridge’s life, and, especially in the beginning, it’s difficult to see where it might be going. But eventually all of these vignettes weave into a full portrait of a woman living half a life. He describes things so well. At one point, she has read a political book and decides she will vote differently this time around. She never gets around to talking to Mr. Bridge about the book, so she figures that for once they will each vote their own way. But on the way, she starts to feel doubtful about her choice. “And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was.”

While she is floundering in boredom and desperation, we wonder what her problem is. Why not take classes, or volunteer, or take over the baking, or whatever? A long time ago we read I Don’t Know How She Does It, which was the opposite—a woman who was killing herself “having it all”—children, husband, career. We’re looking for a happy medium—not too busy, not too leisurely. We can only hope our stories will end more happily!

Getting Serious with "Sure Signs of Crazy"

Sometimes trying to describe a book succinctly does it a real disservice, because the story itself is hard to encapsulate well. I’m risking that by giving a short description, but here goes.

In Sure Signs of Crazy, 12-year-old Sarah Nelson and her alcoholic father have moved from town to town in Texas throughout her young life. She usually spends summers with her grandparents, but is hoping for something different this summer. She is growing up, though no one seems to recognize it. She loves words and plants, and she is obsessed with Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird (that was enough to win me over all by itself).

But looming large over everything else is the fact that her mother is in a mental hospital as a result of her attempt to drown Sarah when she was only two years old, and she succeeded in drowning Sarah’s twin brother. Sarah is haunted by the thought that she too could be headed down the road to mental illness, and she searches herself for signs.

Author Karen Harrington either kept excellent notes during her own experience of this age or she has observed others very closely; she completely nails what it is to be a girl on the edge of adolescence. Sarah wants so badly to be taken seriously by those older than her, and at the same time she wants to be taken care of by her father in the way that any child deserves.

When I first looked at the book, I thought that this was an odd choice of storylines for young people, and I thought that people living with mental illness should not be something that you fear--even the use of the word "crazy" seems immediately pejorative. Somehow the author walks that dangerous line successfully. Part of the reason for that is that it's from the perspective of a traumatized girl, and that is probably how she would describe her mother.

While this novel deals with some pretty heavy-hitting events, it does so with a gentle touch and an honest love for all of the characters. The publisher lists this as a novel for ages 9 and up—I’d bump that minimum age up to mature 12-year-olds. But I’m living proof the book isn’t limited to the children’s market--I couldn't put it down.

The Lifeboat: Save It or Throw It Overboard?

Well, after an unintentional year-long sabbatical, thought it might be time to get back at it. I have no excuse to offer as to why I’ve stopped blogging; I haven’t stopped reading!

The Fab 5 Book Club has not stopped reading either. Tonight we tackled The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. Before we get started, you need to understand that the Fab 5, while being a very chatty crowd, does not always stay on topic very well. Also you need to understand that we don’t all always come terribly prepared.

Tonight was a different story. Everyone had finished the book, even the one who started it last night at 5 and finished it around midnight (Hint: This was not me, at least not this time). It’s a fairly quick read, which is always helpful in last-minute cramming. And Nancy was very eager to get started, trying to come up with some less-than-obvious segues from the food we were noshing to the plot of the book, things like “I bet they wished they had cheese like this on the lifeboat.”

And finally we gave in and actually talked about the book. The Lifeboat is a story about just what it sounds like, a lifeboat. The Empress Alexandra, a fictional ocean liner crossing the Atlantic just 2 years after the Titanic disaster, sinks in open water, and passengers scramble to get onto lifeboats. Grace, a new bride, is pushed onto a lifeboat by her husband, and the story begins. Thirty-nine people set off in a lifeboat, only to be lost at sea for 21 grueling days.

At the start of the book, Grace has survived the lifeboat and now finds herself facing a new obstacle: she is standing trial. She writes a diary of her experiences for her lawyers.

Grace is an enigmatic character, presenting readers with lots of ethical and moral questions. But while this might seem to be a book based on the old ethics question of the lifeboat—a lifeboat has too many people, so you must find a rational way to decide who should go overboard—it really turns out to be something different. As Grace goes through the process of recollection, trying to bring to the surface moments that she cannot easily remember, readers find no easy understanding of her fellow passengers’ actions. Nor can we get a handle on Grace herself. So rather than asking what we would do in their situation, we spent a lot of time trying to understand who did what and why.

Interestingly, three of the four of us read this book with one or two other stories in the back of our minds, influencing what we read. Sonya had the movie Titanic in her head, which made her suspicious of Grace’s husband’s actions before the boat sank. Nancy couldn’t help but think of our recent read Gone Girl, in which a woman’s diary takes on a different significance as the book goes on. I had shadows of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, in which the main character has been accused of murder but you really have no idea if she is guilty or not, or what guilt even means. Also Life of Pi loomed large in the lifeboat imagination.

This may be the longest period of time we’ve ever spent talking about a book at book club, which is all the more surprising since each of us expressed some degree of disappointment with the book. There are many, many threads and clues—or red herrings, as the case may be—that lead us nowhere, and none of us were terribly satisfied with that. Grace says straight out that we can’t know everything, but that did nothing to quell our dissatisfaction. We spent a bit of time talking about whether a book (or other form of entertainment) should tie up most or all loose ends, or if that is also unsatisfying. It seems there is some middle ground, Chekhov’s gun notwithstanding.

It may be that my own dissatisfaction with the ending had less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that I was reading it electronically, and the end came even though there were still 30 more digital pages to go—acknowledgements, suggested reading, endorsements, reading group guide, etc. etc. And here I thought there was still more to the story.

Of course we did get a bit off topic, debating which people we might be okay with pushing overboard and discussing the fact that all of us would probably die within the first few days because we are, well, soft. Barbara mentioned the day that she had a paper cut on the tip of her finger, and her day was an anguish of alternating between typing with a band-aid on, which made for many typing errors, and typing without a band-aid, which “really hurt.” I scoffed at the idea of needing a trailer to go camping, then remembered that the threat of a rainstorm sends me from my tent to the nearest hotel. Don’t think any of us would do too well in boot camp, let alone any real human deprivation.

But no deprivation was happening here, as we passed around the dark chocolate sea salt caramels. Final judgment: The Lifeboat had some saving graces, but you don't really want to stay in it forever.