For today’s new episode of Selected Novels, we talked to Catherine Lacey—author of, most recently, The Möbius Book—about Evan S. Connell’s 1959 novel Mrs. Bridge. This novel, Connell’s first, came out the same year that Philip Roth and John Updike also made their debuts, and competed unsuccessfully against Goodbye, Columbus for the National Book Award—yet comes from a different stylistic universe altogether. Comprised of very short chapters that follow no plot other than the quiet life of its title character, the novel is strangely anticipatory of and yet distinctly different from the fragments of Jenny Offill and the microfictions of Lydia Davis, at once a comic satire and a tender, sympathetic treatment of the mid-century American housewife. We discuss with Catherine what the novel gains from its abandonment of interiority, what happens when you think of a chapter as “a complete machine with its own internal tensions,” and the influence Mrs. Bridge has had on her own fiction.
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