Though she lacks the perspicacity to reply, Mrs Bridge is aware that the question concerns the “carbuncular presence” she senses – a lurking torpor which it becomes her life’s work to ignore. Mrs Bridge is tireless in her resistance, yet everywhere there are signs of unease: “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale – the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?” asks her friend Grace before swallowing 50 sleeping pills. From all sides come threats to the fortress of her normalcy: odd gifts from an inscrutable relative arrive like portents of a disordered wider world, while as her children grow, their insistent modernity drives her to petty acts of retribution that are cruel and comic in equal measure. C hronicling the decline and fall of a Kansas City housewife, Evan S Connell’s 1959 novel is a gentle social satire that describes a life of unreflective comfort and bourgeois luxury, bounded by dinners at the country club and the faded social conventions to which its heroine clings as articles of faith.
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