Lonely Mom

MRS. BRIDGE (254 pp.) -- Evan S. Connell Jr.--Viking ($2.75).

Since people presumably enjoy reading about themselves, this strongly appealing book should be enjoyed by legions of women who will see themselves (or at least their neighbors) in its heroine's everyday crises and commonplaces, stupidities and minor conquests, emotions half understood and alternatives wholly missed. Unlike choleric, Mom-baiting Philip Wylie, Author Connell sees the Mom of his first novel as a saccharine, easily swayed and sympathetic character. Far from monstrously dominating her husband and three children, Mrs. Bridge is so tame and timid that her daughter Carolyn says coldly: "Listen, Mother, no man is ever going to push me around the way Daddy pushed you around."

Daddy is a well-to-do, eternally busy Kansas City attorney, who showers his wife with money as well as silence. Mrs. Bridge fills her days with abortive attempts to paint, to learn Spanish, to keep a scrapbook, to read. But her grasshopper attention is best held by gossipy lunches and club meetings. Novelist Connell seems to say that the very fatness of Midwestern life makes for fatheadedness in its citizens.

To tell the life story of gentle Mrs. Bridge ("Her first name was India--she was never able to get used to it"), he uses a mannered but often effective device of 117 very short chapters, each concerned with a single episode, often a single glancing thought or aspiration. The reader, in effect, leafs through a verbal photograph album, ranging from an eleven-line snapshot of Mrs. Bridge finding her small son staring meditatively at the dressmaker's dummy of her figure (thereafter, she hides it in the attic) to a seven-page description of a country-club dinner that is as savagely tedious as anything in Babbitt. There are sharply accurate glimpses of a far-from-adult grownup trying to cope with adolescents, of a dark, feminine hatred toward the machine. There is, above all, the nameless fear that somehow life itself is a mysterious machine that is not running as well as it should.

Author Connell's novel is an expanded version of a short story that appeared in The Anatomy Lesson (TIME, May 27, 1957), but added incident does not necessarily bring greater understanding. When catastrophe breaks into his heroine's hothouse existence, the author flinches nearly as much as she: the event is seen from the outside, and the reader cannot know if Mrs. Bridge feels any more deeply than the cliches she utters. He is a gentler observer than Philip Wylie, but Connell's conclusions about U.S. womanhood may not be too different. He has one of his suburban matrons passionately ask another: "Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale--the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?"

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