Bridge puts it, that there are “two kinds of people in the world”-a notion that can be complicated in its ramifications. Both women wanted terribly to be comme il faut, believing, as Mrs. Bridge of Kansas City would have shared my grandmother’s bewilderment.

Fifty-five years ago, my paternal grandmother gave a welcoming soiree for my young mother, pigtailed and hugely pregnant, who took one look at the assembled hausfrauen of Vinita, Oklahoma, and sat down to watch Bonanza.

Bridge were part of a generation that my parents (in particular) saw fit to rebel against. In other respects the Bridge family could hardly have been more different from my own-indeed, Mr. It seems significant, now, that I read Connell’s book for the first time in the same sixteen-story building where my brother had once hung from the horizontal flagpole on the roof, an episode that would have made a perfect minichapter in one of the Bridge novels: the besotted young man from a well-to-do family, smirking (I imagine) at all the genteel lunching ladies on the sidewalk far below his dangling feet-another caper, another épater, but deftly portending the tragedy to come. I wonder if something of the sort occurred to me that day in 1991, when I sat in a little mall café near the bookstore and began reading Mrs. The disaster of Scott’s life didn’t happen in a vacuum we, as a family, were foremost in determining one another’s fates. Early versions of my book focused almost entirely on my older brother, Scott, a self-destructive oddball who was, after all, the person most like me in the world-and this, I gradually learned, was very much to the point. Until then, I’d considered Yates’s novel The Easter Parade (1976) to be pretty much the last word on middle-class American families-I shared his pessimism on the subject, suffice it to say-though a decade would pass before I became Yates’s biographer and then, a little later, began writing my own account of family life, The Splendid Things We Planned. I discovered the Bridge novels one day in 1991 at the Full Circle Bookstore in my hometown of Oklahoma City. Bridge is better, I think, than all but ten or fifteen American novels written in the postwar era-would suggest that Yates was onto something, at least where he and Connell were concerned.

That the Bridge novels are so clearly superior to Connell’s other books-and Mrs. Bridge (1969), he also wrote a fascinating account of General Custer, along with a lot of other nonfiction, poetry, and an odd assortment of novels and short stories that might have been written by five or six different authors. Connell might have disagreed: Though he wrote two masterpieces about family life in midcentury America, Mrs. “That’s all there is to write about,” Yates replied. “ALL I WRITE ABOUT IS FAMILY ,” Elizabeth Cox once remarked to Richard Yates, who had helped her with her first novel.

Mrs bridge evan connell