In 1909, William Butler Yeats posited a theory of romantic devotion. "True love is a discipline," he wrote in his journal. "Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life."
The idea that love compels us to make aspirational selves is a romantic one, but the reciprocal artifice can be tyrannical too. It's an argument made by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, two of the most read and talked-about novels from the past few years. Both are about rage and deceit and marriage, and - most crucially - both are split in two, with the husband's recounting of the relationship paired with the wife's complicating narrative corrective. In a strange way, the novels contain within themselves their own sequels. The success these books enjoyed has revealed how eager American readers are not only for plot-thick page-turners written in decent prose but ones that argue, in their very structure, for the authority of a female point of view.
A half-century earlier, the author Evan S Connell, who died in 2013 and is perhaps best remembered for Son of the Morning Star, his biography of George Armstrong Custer, published Mrs. Bridge, the story of a fictional Kansas City housewife. A decade after that, he published Mr. Bridge, the story of her attorney husband. Together, the two novels, which are told in deadpan vignettes, are at once the saddest and funniest books I've ever read about marriage.
Mrs. Bridge's life hews closely, in outline, to the midcentury caricature of a woman we now smugly pity. She plays card games and performs volunteer work and frets over the neatness of her family's clothing. She picks up but always abandons books; she tries and fails to learn Spanish. Harriet, the maid, takes care of cleaning and cooking. Mr. Bridge, meanwhile, spends long hours at the office and obsesses over the legalese in his own will. From a distance, he appears to be that familiar and suddenly most stylish of villains: a man, basically good, but alive at a time when good meant something different, something we now consider bad.
Mrs. Bridge yearns for her aloof husband to express his love; Mr. Bridge, who has "practically everything he ever wanted," wishes he could do just that. "He needed to let her know how deeply he felt her presence while they were lying together during the night, as well as each morning when they awoke and in the evening when he came home," Connell writes. "However, he could think of nothing appropriate."
But unlike the Rashomon effect at work in Gone Girl and Fates and Furies, the thrill (and complicated blend of sadness and relief) at play in Connell's books comes less from the divergent interpretations of shared experience than from the realisation that both characters harbour similarly inaccessible emotions. The twist, such as it is, is not that the wife secretly loathes her husband but that the husband secretly loves his wife.
It feels greedy to want a sequel to a book that already has one. But that is exactly what I want. The Bridges have two daughters and a son, Douglas, who is "introspective" but "totally unremarkable" and the source of much of the books' humour and weird specificity. I'd love to know what it is like for Douglas - "hostile to guest towels," known to groan with "elaborate agony" when impatient - to live with parents so alienated from each other. Connell conceded that the novels were semiautobiographical, meaning that in a certain sense we may already have Douglas's perspective by the mere fact of having these books. But it is a perspective of a cleareyed adult, not a child. And a child can be a marriage's witness. I for one would like to see Douglas's real-time report.
© 2016 The New York Times
