Evan S. Connell's Mrs Bridge is an extraordinary
tragicomic portrayal of suburban life and one of the
classic American novels of the twentieth century,
influencing books such as Jonathan Franzen's The
Corrections. This edition has an introduction by Joshua
Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and The
Unnamed. Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative
housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a
kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time with
shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her
children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners.
And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her
children aren't growing up into the people she expected,
and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation
that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic,
telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the
narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at
the heart of a life of plenty. The companion novel Mr
Bridge, telling the story from the other side of the
marriage, is also available in Penguin Modern Classics,
with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, author of We
Need to Talk About Kevin. Evan S. Connell was born in
Kansas City in 1924.He served in the US navy in the
second world war and lived briefly in Paris before
returning to the US, where he wrote an incredibly varied
range of books and supported himself with odd jobs. In
2009, he was nominated for the Man Booker International
Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, he was
awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Connell died in
New Mexico on 10th January 2013, aged 88. ''How it is
done I only wish I knew''. (Dorothy Parker). ''An
exquisite mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment''.
(Independent). |
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