Mrs Bridge

 With nearly all my books in storage (not for much longer, thank G--), I'm still largely dependent on Lichfield's fine charity bookshops for my reading. The other day I spotted a Penguin Modern Classic I'd never heard of, by an author whose name was equally unknown to me. Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell was one source – the other being, as you'd expect, Mr Bridge – for a Merchant-Ivory film, Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990), but I had never seen that either, so I had no idea what to expect when I opened Mrs Bridge.
  It was published in 1959, but is set in the Thirties and Forties. The eponymous Mrs Bridge is an unfulfilled upper-middle-class (in English terms) housewife, wife of a successful lawyer, mother of three, resident of a prosperous suburb of Kansas City. Nearly everything that unfolds in the course of the novel is told from her perspective, which, as she increasingly but haltingly realises, is too narrowly circumscribed to make sense of much that is going on around her. Though it is a tale of growing unhappiness and alienation, it's told with a deftly comic touch that makes it much more readable than most such chronicles of suburban dissatisfaction. The tone is bittersweet, mildly satirical, but at heart affectionate and sympathetic (Mrs Bridge is partly based on the author's own mother). It unfolds in a series of short vignettes, some as little as a paragraph, none more than half a dozen pages – 117 of them in a novel of 180-odd pages – and this works to turn what might, in more traditional form, have been a plod into something that sparkles with a distinctive brilliance. I've greatly enjoyed reading it, and I think it deserves its 'modern classic' status.
  The copy I have has been heavily pencil-marked, with many underlinings, circled words and marginal exclamation marks. I was intrigued to find at one point that the underliner had written in the margin 'Afternoons. Larkin'. This was linked with an arrow to a sentence beginning 'The house was so quiet that she began to think how noisy it had been when all the children had been there, how very much different everything had been...' Mrs Bridge has been pushed to the side of her own life... 

Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

['Afternoons' was written in 1959, the year Mrs Bridge was published.)