Mrs Bridge

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 works such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. This edition has an introduction by Joshua Ferris. Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time 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.