![]() ![]() When her daughter Carolyn informs her that the cleaning lady has arrived, she corrects her. Mrs Bridge is also a fair bit racist, pretentious, and prone to being judgmental. As Ruth shuts the door, Mrs Bridge, hopeless now, calls out, ‘But, dear, a lady always carries a purse!’ In one chapter, she chides her daughter Ruth for not carrying a purse when she goes out, and for not fastening the top bottom of her blouse. She puts out expensive hand towels for guests and, sure that they will never use them, carefully packs them away after they leave. India Bridge, whose ‘parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her,’ can be ridiculous. Not least because he has a sense of humor about the whole thing. There is much to admire in Connell’s telling. It is, I think, the same strategy that Jhumpa Lahiri expertly deployed years later in The Namesake, to tell the story of the Gangulis. But the fragments accumulate to form a dazzling whole. The prose itself is simple and straightforward. Connell gives us a series of short vignettes from the life of an upper-middle-class housewife in Kansas City. ![]()
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