Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge
In his 1959 novel, Mrs Bridge, Evan S. Connell gives us a series of short vignettes from the life of an upper-middle-class housewife in Kansas City. The prose itself is simple and straightforward. There are no tricks. But the fragments accumulate to form a dazzling whole. It is, I think, the same strategy that Jhumpa Lahiri expertly deployed years later in The Namesake, to tell the story of the Gangulis. There is much to admire in Connell’s telling. Not least because he has a sense of humor about the whole thing. India Bridge, whose ‘parents must have been thinking of someone else when ...
Source: granta.com