This series delves into the lives of a quintessential American middle-class couple during the mid-20th century. With keen observation and subtle irony, the novels explore the surface-level existence of their seemingly perfect lives, revealing the emptiness hidden beneath societal conventions and material comforts. Through intimate character portraits, the series questions the nature of marriage, happiness, and the search for meaning within the framework of the American dream.
Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time with shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners.
The classic novel about a repressed upper-middle-class husband in the American Midwest, by a New York Times bestselling and Man Booker Prize winning author. Walter Bridge is an ambitious Kansas City lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he senses that his family needs something--even when what they need is more of him and less of his money. Affluence, material assets, and comforts create a cocoon of respectability that cloaks the void within--not the skeleton in the closet but a black hole swallowing the whole household. Together with its companion, Mrs. Bridge , this novel is a classic portrait of a man, a marriage, and the manners and mores of a particular social class in the first half of twentieth-century America. "A small masterpiece." --Joyce Carol Oates "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are forever human, forever vulnerable, forever pitiable. In spare, whimsical, ironic prose, Connell exposes each and every one of their wrinkles and then, in the end, offers them to us as human beings to be cherished." -- The Washington Post