Bridge’s chronic sense of unease, which gives way to personal dislocation (word 33), crushing doubt (42), a desire to confront the source of that doubt (54), and a sighing retreat from this dangerous impulse (60). It takes a grand total of 14 humdrum words for Connell to establish Mrs. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it. It’s impossible to convey how much tension Connell packs into his sentences, how wrenching he renders each passage, without quoting him. She wages brief, doomed little wars against the conventions that imprison her.

She suffers the neglect of her ambitious husband.

She teaches them manners, but cannot reach them emotionally. It is composed of 117 chapters, most of them no longer than a few hundred words. Its prose is austere and rigorous, devoid of metaphors, devoid of anything, in fact, that might distract us from the muffled plight of our heroine. Bridge is about a repressed upper class matriach living in Kansas City during the Depression. Connell, and I’m especially happy to do so because there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of the book, and if there’s one possible good to be drawn from our juvenile lust for Big Stupid Awards, it’s that they might rescue certain works of art from the vault of criminal neglect.

The first two paragraphs alone make that clear.īut it’s my honor-one I had to lobby for, frankly-to discuss Mrs. The latter is, for my money, the best book Saul Bellow ever wrote, a dazzling existential picaresque propelled by the most brave and ferocious voice ever devised. Goodbye, Columbus is, as the blurbs might phrase it, an auspicious debut. I realize I am now expected, by the sacred law of literary deference, that code of automatic qualification by which writers defang their most fangy judgments, to tell you how much I love Goodbye, Columbus, and how brilliant Phillip Roth is (as if he needed my endorsement), and how corrupt the entire realm of literary prize giving is because it indulges our childish need to subject the essentially private, intimate experience of reading into a vulgar public debate, all of which happens to be true, and none of which makes the 1960 NBA Award any less of a sham.Īs supporting evidence, I offer six words.Īnyone who has read either of these books will understand the bafflement and consternation felt by myself and the rest of the committee when we learned these books had been passed over. It is (to paraphrase Fielding Mellish) a travesty of a mockery of a sham. Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity, and Access (EDIA)Īs much as this will make me seem like kind of an asshole, it has to be said: the 1960 National Book Award given to Goodbye, Columbus is a travesty.

Mrs bridge author