Word: mr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MR. BRIDGE by Evan S. Connell Jr. 369 pages. Knopf...
...husband's turn has come. Where Mrs. Bridge served mostly as a target (roughly the size of a garage door), Mr. Bridge is approached with an odd mixture of respect, horror and wan amusement. The result is a strait-laced piece of comment on one facet of the American character more akin to Main Street than to the jocular psychedelic mayhem currently indulged in by black humorists...
...Mr. Bridge is a good man, a man of principle. He prefers not to laugh at dirty stories, and gambling angers him. His actual faith is the familiar mixture of pragmatic boosterism and hard-shell propriety. "Civilization may not be rotting," he concedes. "My personal opinion is that if Roosevelt and his left-wing advisers do not undermine the freedom and security of this nation we should see advances in many fields of endeavor which will literally stagger the imagination...
Middle-Class Minefield. Since he is already in possession of everything he can think of that he might want, Mr. Bridge considers himself happy. He has a Lincoln and a Chrysler, a country-club membership and the best Negro cook in town. He has an array of stocks and bonds (which he contemplates at intervals in the basement of Virgil Barren's bank). Still, mysteriously and unfairly, his normal existence seems filled with threats. Waiters "take advantage of people every chance they get." Negroes unreasonably wish to be regarded as fellow human beings. Jews violate standards of business practice...
...hard to stand. But his restrained tone of voice and inhumanly cool, cruel irony convey the impression of barely repressed personal rancor, such as a son might feel in trying to discuss his father. Perhaps this, and the fact that it is set in the 1930s, is what makes Mr. Bridge more than an objective caricature of the uptight WASP personality so often under attack today. What emerges is a muted image of an American type as pure, enduring and applicable as George F. Babbitt ever was. Mr. Bridge's unwitting and rather dated dilemma, Connell suggests, is capable...