Main Street Reviscerated

MR. BRIDGE by Evan S. Connell Jr. 369 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Like some sunken Atlantis, a Middle West lurks in the collective unconscious of many Americans. In that Middle West the year is still 1930-something, the lawns are broad and sleek, locusts whine in the elms on summer afternoons. There are vacant lots suitable for baseball. Prosperous businessmen eat lunch together every day at the hotel grill, and their wives have card parties with small prizes--a vocabulary-building book or a piece of bone china. There are, of course, bad neighborhoods, some colored, some criminal; people with alien names; poor people (mostly lazy); and a dangerous President in the White House. Be that as it may (a favorite locution of Walter Bridge), the place is a licensed fragment of the American dream, from a time when it was still possible to believe that such inequities as existed would soon be expunged by a little hard work and a few more schools and jobs.

Hello Out There? Ten years ago. in his first novel, Evan S. Connell created a brilliant portrait of one inhabitant of this psychic heartland, Mrs. India Bridge, mother of three, wife of a successful Kansas City lawyer. Written as a sequence of linked vignettes, Mrs. Bridge showed a remorseless accuracy and a comic sense powerful enough to reduce its subject to her feckless gist. (In the final scene, she has managed to get stuck inside her own garage. She is last seen tapping on the car window with the ignition key as she calls, to no one, "Hello? Hello out there?")

Now her 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 and profit anyway; they also try to move into one's neighborhood.

On top of all this, Bridge keeps being asked to commit himself emotionally. Almost by reflex, he tries to reach his children, but his gestures end in general embarrassment. Though he loves his wife, he can think of nothing appropriate that might convey that fact except a new car and some shares of Kansas City Power & Light. Determined to retain his dignity, he moves carefully through the sunny meadow of middle-class affluence as through a dangerous minefield.

Connell perceives the humor in Bridge's predicament, which is probably necessary: a good man is 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 of pointing a lesson for today. The old, defensive virtues--the living of life rationally, correctly and righteously--are no longer enough to know the world for what it is or meet more than its meanest challenges.

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