num_pages: 246
description: Best-selling author Evan S. Connell is expert at sketching the banalities and trivialities of middle-class values, customs, and habits. Like Mr. Bridge, its counterpart, Mrs. Bridge is comprised of over one hundred titled chapters, containing vignettes, an image, a fragment of conversation, an event—all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided beneath by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal alienation. With a surgeon’s skill Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development beneath. Mrs. Bridge recedes more and more into doubt and confusion as her three children and husband become more remote and silent. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. A fly caught unawares in amber for eternity is no more immobilized and exposed than Mrs. Bridge, trapped in her garage as her novel ends.
language: English
title: Mrs. Bridge
titlecomplete: Mrs. Bridge
genres: Classics, American, Adult Fiction, Novels, Family, Historical Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 6812
series: Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge 
awards: awardedAt: -315590400000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard