Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge

As adventurous, free-thinking friends introduce new ideas into their household, Mrs. Bridge begins to question the life she has led as one by one her children leave home, but not for the lives she wished for them. Mrs. Bridge feels as if the world she built with her husband is crumbling, brick by brick, but Mr. Bridge remains resolute, a firm believer in his family and his place at the head of the table.

For Walter Bridge, an ambitious lawyer, and his wife, whose focus is her household, affluence and material comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void within. Mr. Bridge is dominated by reason and common sense but is vaguely aware that something is missing from his life. Mrs. Bridge, now that her children have grown up, is slowly going mad from boredom. They wonder why there is no joy. As adventurous, free-thinking friends introduce new ideas into their household, they come close to making tiny steps toward change.

India Bridge’s house is a prison, her life a collection of redundancies. Overnight, her children have turned into willful, frightening creatures and her husband into an unsolvable enigma. When India tries to reach beyond the limitations around her, she begins to realize the scattered truths that hide themselves in fear and solitude.

A lawyer with a growing stockpile of securities in the bank, three beautiful children, a compliant and decorative wife, and a lovely house in the suburbs, Walter Bridge has achieved all that is expected of someone of his race and background. But try as he might to control the lives of those around him, they prove perversely independent. In Mr. Bridge and its companion, Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell has brilliantly realized the lives of upper-middle-class Americans living in the years just before and during World War II.