Synopses & Reviews
Walter Bridge is an ambitious lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he sense that his family needs something, even when what they need is more of him and less of his money. Affluence, material assets, and comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void withinnot the skeleton in the closet but a black hole swallowing the whole household.
The Bridge novels have been recognized as classics during their authors lifetime. With their shared ability to capture the manners and mores of the American upper middle class, Connell has done for the late thirties what Sinclair Lewis did for the twenties.
Synopsis
The classic novel about a repressed upper-middle-class husband in the American Midwest, by a New York Times bestselling and Man Booker Prize winning author.
Walter Bridge is an ambitious Kansas City lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he senses that his family needs something--even when what they need is more of him and less of his money. Affluence, material assets, and comforts create a cocoon of respectability that cloaks the void within--not the skeleton in the closet but a black hole swallowing the whole household.
Together with its companion, Mrs. Bridge, this novel is a classic portrait of a man, a marriage, and the manners and mores of a particular social class in the first half of twentieth-century America.
"A small masterpiece." --Joyce Carol Oates
"Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are forever human, forever vulnerable, forever pitiable. In spare, whimsical, ironic prose, Connell exposes each and every one of their wrinkles and then, in the end, offers them to us as human beings to be cherished." --The Washington Post