Youd on Mrs. Bridge:
"I performed Connell's paired novels, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, back to back in his home town of Kansas City where the novels are set. Taken together, the two novels offer a parallax view of the decades long progression of the marriage of an upper middle class early/mid-twentieth-century couple and their offspring. The novels are remarkable for their subtle deconstruction of the form of the novel, juxtaposed against the faltering sense of any meaning in the stolid and stable way of midwestern American life. I retyped Mrs. Bridge at the H&R Block ArtSpace in the Country Club Plaza section of the city, where the fictional Bridges and the real-life Connell lived. And, I retyped Mr. Bridge in the downtown Kansas City Public Library. The novels are each written as a string of often obliquely related vignettes, often about subjects mundane or domestic in nature, which delightful in their craftsmanship, and ultimately possessing of great existential force when assembled together."