Funny web comic here.

By reading Mrs. Bridge, I feel like I’ve joined an elite club of writers who know about this novel. Maybe I’m wrong, but I rarely hear anyone discuss Connell, and I’ve never seen him on a course syllabus. But this is a stunning novel. I can’t speak highly enough about it: Mrs. Bridge is stunning, both for its artistry and for its technique.

The story is easy enough to summarize: Mrs. Bridge is a somewhat lonely and confused housewife and mother of three in Kansas City in the 1930s. Her husband is a lawyer who works long hours, and her children are basically decent kids who as they grow up grow emotionally distant from their mother. Over the course of 20 years or so, Mrs. Bridge gets married, goes to Auxiliary club meetings, badgers her children, and tries to deal with the boredom of not having enough to do (they have a housekeeper and cook who does most of the housework).

In short, not much actually happens here. But the novel is told in very short vignettes, and each scene builds a picture of who this character is. Connell employs a third-person, somewhat distant voice, which allows for an element of satire, though not so much that you don’t care for the characters. And the restrained voice perfectly suits the subject, for the milieu — the bored upper class suburbs — is one of restraint.

You’ll know within 10 pages if this is a novel you’d want to finish. But if you enjoy Jonathan Franzen or Charles Baxter, you’ll really enjoy Evan S. Connell, who paved the way for them.

My review of Pollock’s new novel, The Devil All the Time, is in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.

School starts next week for Emily, so even though I don’t have “summer vacation,” I’m declaring the summer of Henry James complete. I read five and a half of his novels, along with many of his prefaces.

Of The Tragic Muse, which I didn’t finish but might one day, I’ll say that if you were only going to read one big book from his middle stage (other than The Portrait of  a Lady), The Tragic Muse should be it. There are two story lines. One follows Nick Dormer, a young man who wants to be a painter but whose family and income requirements push him into politics. The second is about Miriam Rooth, a young stage actress. I don’t know exactly where James is going with the story, but what’s developing is this idea that high art is a calling and a true counter to efforts at political reform. The novel also allows James to mull over the idea of high art (art for art’s sake, or for the sake of the artist) versus low art (art purely for the sake of the audience). As one character comments about the stage:

Do I think it’s important? Is that what you mean? Important, certainly, to managers and stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who want to produce themselves in public by lime-light, and to other ladies and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don’t know what to do with their evening. It’s a commercial and social convenience which may be infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How can it be–so poor, so limited a form?

Granted, the character is speaking of theater in a time when theater was the equivalent of evening sitcoms today. But the larger context is a discussion of what muse the artist is serving. In any case, according to this character, the lowly art of theater is still superior to politics.

I’ve got a thick stack of Alice Munro on my shelf, and I’m currently enamored with her and the shorter form. I might finish up the James eventually. On my list were The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age (to pair with his prefaces). I was going to save the last three novels–The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl–for later. For now, I’ve gleaned what I need from James, an appreciation for character, and perspective, and subtlety. Munro is good for that as well, I’m finding.

This is a strange one for James, in that it’s about the poor side of London and reads more like Dickens than the author of The Portrait of a Lady. In fact, Lionel Trilling classifies it as a “young man from the provinces” novel, which is also the plot of Great Expectations. The Princess Casamassima is about Hyacinth Robinson, a poor kid whose French mother murdered his aristocratic father, and he was raised by a dressmaker. As an adult, he works as a bookbinder and catches the attention of the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light from Roderick Hudson. He also stumbles into a group of would-be revolutionaries who are plotting an uprising for the working man. Hyacinth is torn by the competing worldviews — the aristocracy versus the workers, or manners versus revolution. The princess herself is interested in him out of boredom, so he becomes something of a science project for her, which he comes to realize his folly at the end, which I won’t spoil.

I wasn’t really in the mood for this type of novel. I wanted to like it, because it seemed to mesh with social novels of Dickens, or the Naturalists, or those political paranoiacs Dostoevsky and Conrad. But it fell flat for me. Now might be an appropriate time, in my summer of reading James, to discuss his so-called “middle phase.” Novels of his early phase seem to be exercises in perspective. The plots are essentially the same — a person living in folly comes to an unfortunate understanding — and this plot is carried into his middle phase — roughly Portrait through The Tragic Muse. About The Bostonians, I commented that James’s true strength lies in his ability to portray human psychology, particularly manipulations or emotional abuse. My qualm with his middle novels is that he’s also trying to do something more, to portray society in the spirit of Balzac (whom I’ve not read). The Bostonians is a study of reform and The Princess Casamassima is a study of revolution, and James portrays both impulses of societal change as exercises in human folly.

Maybe he’s right, but in his method I’m not sure he really dives into the hysteria or the depravity of those impulses, the way Dostoevsky and even Conrad do. I feel like Dostoevsky knows he’s a sinner when he writes about humans in need of grace. Maybe Dostoevsky understands people don’t change, but he’s empathetic to the worst. James holds the revolutionaries at arm’s length. He treats Hyacinth with empathy, but Hyacinth is naive and impressionable — “bewildered,” to use James’s term in his preface to the novel. Maybe, once again, it’s a challenge of perspective, because we’re in the bewildered character’s state of mind, and he’s immersed in this whole other world James wants to show us, but that other world, to me, isn’t what James does best. I might revisit the novel at some point, when I’m not mulling so heavily over perspective and consciousness, and more in the mood for a Dickensian social novel.

I’ve got The Tragic Muse on the shelf, but I’m not sure I can do another one of these 600-page social novels right now. Stay tuned.