Selected Novels | Catherine Lacey on Evan S. Connell

On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to Catherine Lacey about Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge.

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Transcript

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Jessica Swoboda  00:15

Hey everyone, welcome back to Selected Novels. So Zach, who do we have on the show?

Zach Fine  00:21

This week we spoke to Catherine Lacey, who's the author of six books, including Biography of X, Pew and, most recently, The Möbius Book, which was published by FSG in June. Catherine has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. For this episode, we talked to Catherine about Evan S. Connell's novel Mrs. Bridge, which was originally published in 1959. We hope you enjoy. 

Jessica Swoboda  00:47

We'd love to hear from you. So if you have questions, comments or anything else, definitely send us an email at selected novels@thepointmag.com and be sure to subscribe to The Point, which is the magazine that brings you content like this podcast, you can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the episode notes.

Zach Fine  01:18

Hi, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Novels.

Catherine Lacey  01:23

Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here. 

Zach Fine  01:26

So today we're talking about Evan Connell's novel, Mrs. Bridge, and before we dive into the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about Connell and his life.

Catherine Lacey  01:38

I actually don't know a ton about him, but from because it, this book has been really important to me, and it just, it didn't really matter to me who had written it, but I do know that he was born in Kansas City in like 1924 or 25 and I'm pretty sure this was his first novel. I should have, like, confirmed all of this, but I'm, I'm pretty sure this is first novel. It definitely came out in 1959 and around the same time, either the same year or shortly thereafter. There were debuts from John Updike, Philip Roth and Richard Yates, I think, all the same year. I may have gotten one of those names wrong, but like, definitely, like, it was, like, kind of that moment in American literature. And of course, I would say, having read those other authors like Mrs. Bridge is totally an outlier, and I think there wasn't really anything like it coming out at that time. And I think for that reason, it was nominated for the National Book Award that year. It lost to Philip Roth for Goodbye, Columbus. But, you know, I think it did have a readership, and he definitely was kind of one of the exciting young novelists of that time. But then, as far as I can tell, it seems like the book sort of fell out of, like, circulation. I really don't know that many people that have that have read it. Of course, we've know plenty of people that have read Roth and Updike and and Richard Yates. But actually, I was, like, almost going to do Easter Parade for this, but I did not. Later, he wrote a companion piece to Mrs. Bridge called Mr. Bridge. That's basically the same format, but it's just from Mr. Bridge's perspective. It's not as good. I of course, read it because I'm, like, an uber fan. And there was, actually, there's a there was a movie made out of Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, I think it's called Mr. And Mrs. Bridge, which is totally on is totally unfair, because Mrs. Bridge actually came first. But, yeah, I've never seen the movie. I have no interest in seeing the movie, even though I think it is Paul Newman. But whatever, I think the book is enough for me. I find it completely sufficient and exciting. And I know that Connell went on to write, he wrote poetry, he wrote stories, he wrote, a I think he got more into non fiction the older he got. I think he wrote, like, a very important history of, like, General Custer or something. But I just don't, I just don't care. I think somebody told me they're like, ah, that book actually is really, really good. You should read it. But I'm just like, I'm not going to so I haven't. 

Jessica Swoboda  03:58

I totally get that. Can you say a bit more about why you chose Mrs. Bridge and when you first encountered the novel?

Catherine Lacey  04:07

So I first encountered this novel. I thought that, well, I first encountered it in grad school. I went to Columbia for creative nonfiction, and I started there in 2007 but I was friends with a lot of the fiction students, and was taking kind of classes in fiction a little bit, but somebody had assigned, I don't it wasn't assigned in any of my classes, but I remember it was one of the books that a bunch of my friends were reading and were excited about, to the point that, like a friend of mine, I remember dressed up as Mrs. Bridge at a Halloween party. And so I think because I was like, you know, in my early 20s, and hadn't really known that many people that read serious literature really that much coming from like Mississippi, and then suddenly being in New York, I thought that Mrs. Bridge must have been a very popular book, and I thought everybody had read it. And it was like, one of those things that I just hadn't read yet because I was, like, too young and from the wrong part of the country. But no, it turns out, I don't think anybody really had, not that many people had read it. I thought that it was having a moment, but I think it was really just having a moment in my like, very tiny circle that I was existing in at the time. And I think I'm pretty sure I read it. I read it for the first time while I was traveling, either I started it right before I went on this trip to New Zealand, or I was reading it while I was in New Zealand. I know that it was one of the few books that I had with me. Also, like, at this time, I didn't have like, a smartphone. I mean, a lot of people didn't have smartphones, but, like, there wasn't really internet in New Zealand, and so I was really just, I had, like this book, and maybe, like, a couple of other use books I had found along the way, and I was kind of just like reading them repeatedly. So I read this book like, several times while I was in a very like three months where I was basically not talking to anyone that I knew. Wait, can I ask about that? So you finish, you finish the novel, and then immediately you start back again and read it again. Is that? So that's something you do. I don't normally do that. I've really only done that a couple times in my life when I've been, like, isolated in a foreign country at a very different moment, like I went to Japan when I was 18, and there was no English books there. And I think I just didn't understand there would really be no way for me to get any books in English. And so all I had at the time was 100 Years of Solitude, which I read—no, Love in the Time of Cholera, which I read, like four times, like back to back while I was in Japan and was a teenager. Normally, that wouldn't be how I read a book, but in the past, sometimes we had to do this, given no other option. And then, weirdly, I just brought it with me on a vacation, on a little vacation, and I just failed to bring any other books. I thought that I was going to be reading less or something, and so I I read it, and I immediately did start it again, which is, you know, which is fun, fun for me when it's this book. 

In terms of its plot and the kind of structure, the book just follows Mrs. Bridge, kind of at the moment that she becomes Mrs. Bridge, because I think she has, I don't think that he ever gives her maiden name. I don't think it really matters. Her first name is India, and she was born clearly around, like around the turn of the century, in somewhere near Kansas City, but not actually Kansas City. And then she, you know, I think first chapter, she is sort of being charmed by this guy named Walter, who's, like, about her age. And you know, in the next chapter, they are well, within that chapter, they are married. It's a, it's a one page chapter, two page chapter. And then the second chapter, they have all three of their kids, and so all the chapters are very sometimes they're one page, sometimes they're half a page, sometimes they're a few pages, very short chapters, basically just moving more or less chronologically through her life as it begins in marriage, of course, at This time in America. And it just helps. It mainly is, you know, Mr. Bridge almost immediately ceases to be much of a character. And it's really just about Mrs. Bridge and her children and the other people in her neighborhood, and just her domestic life primarily. But what I like about it is every, every chapter is kind of a complete episode, almost a work of a complete, very short story. It is technically chronological, but it doesn't really follow any sort of traditional conventions of plot, and it has a lot of humor in it. And it's very much a kind of like portrait of the 20s, 30s and 40s in Kansas City, which to me, kind of, I guess part of my connection to it is just being for Mississippi, just not that far away. And I think at this time period, there was more of a I think Mississippi, from what I can understand, was probably very similar to Kansas at this time, the Mississippi that I grew up in, in, like the 80s and 90s, I felt like there was a lot of overlap with, with with this world, and it was kind of exciting, I guess, for that reason. 

Zach Fine

Could you say a little bit more about that? What aspects like, you know, it being landlocked like, what about the culture in Mississippi reminded you of Kansas City?

Catherine Lacey

Yeah, I guess, just emotionally landlocked and sort of like, unquestioningly Protestant and xenophobic and uniform and kind of everything, you know, I think it's like sometimes, you know, it's 2025, right now I'm 40 years old. I feel sometimes like the world that I grew up in the 80s and 90s, in Mississippi, before there was internet, before, before, a lot of things. It really feels so far away. It feels way closer to the world of this book than than anything I can recognize as my life or the life of my contemporaries right now.

It's, you know, the kind of Flannery O'Connor has written a lot about, like the manners of the south of, this collection of essays called Mystery and Manners that I enjoy very much. And I feel like there's a certain kind of formality to the South that I grew up in, that I recognize here also.

Zach Fine  10:11

I was also wondering if we could just pause for a minute on what you were talking about with the chapters, the chapter length. So I was trying to think of precedence for this, because it's like, as you're saying, it's this kind of discrete, kind of micro chapter. It's not a fragment. And these kind of miniature stories, what you think about that kind of formal choice, and whether there are other writers that reminds you of, because I was having trouble like, and I was thinking a little bit of, you know, you know, kind of the microfictions of like Lydia Davis, but I, but I was trying to think of something like this, built on this scale that moves chronologically, but with these kind of short, tight chapters.

Catherine Lacey  10:52

No, I can't think of any examples. That doesn't mean they're not out there. I haven't tried to look that hard, but I don't, you know, in my reading and my kind of asking around about it, I don't know of any book that's structured quite like this. Now, it kind of seems, you know, like the Jenny Offill book from like ten years ago, that I feel like was sort of a lightning rod for, like, Oh, we're writing in this way now, which it wasn't true. She wasn't true. She wasn't like she was the first person that had ever done that or something. But it did, kind of, it was a very popular book that sort of with Dept. of Speculation, that it sort of set off this trend, or I feel like people had this permission to kind of write in a more fragmentary way, and maybe, like, you know, attributing it to, like the internet or this or that. But I think it actually, I don't have any good examples of a novel that really coheres like this, because even Lydia Davis's novels are not written in that kind of short story style, it's a very different form that she that she has in her novels. But yeah, I don't, I don't know, do you I actually, I was hoping maybe one of you would be able to tell me, like, what the precedent for this book was. I mean, when you compare it to the other books that were books that were, you know, that came out that Goodbye, Columbus, or, I don't know what Updike's debut was, I know that off the top of their head, but that book supposedly came out around the same time. I just, I don't know, like the kind of fiction that was being published and popular in the mid-twentieth century. I don't, I don't. I can't think of any examples that were like this, yeah, yeah. Nothing's coming to mind for me either.

Jessica Swoboda  12:30

For me this, like this, short, complete episodes, as you describe them, they really impacted the reading experience for me and but I was left wondering. I'm like, I feel like I know Mrs. Bridge and her daughters and Douglas, like, relatively well, I have, I know a lot about them, but I also like, do I know their interiority at all? Or is this purely, this external view of their everyday life? And so I'm wondering, yeah, do these snippets that we get, do they give us any glimpses into interiority, into consciousness, or is it this, I don't want to say, purely external examination of their life, but is it a mostly kind of external view of their life that we're getting? 

Catherine Lacey  13:08

You know, one thing I did find out is that Evan S. Connell did not have siblings. In the book, there's one boy and two sisters, and the boy is the youngest. And I think I had taken it for granted. He did say at some point that Mrs. Bridge was based on his mother, like, completely, and that she never read it, because by the time it came out, she was like, dying of cancer. And so he wrote it with the, I guess, protection of not having to have his mother face this portrait that he had made of her, or made kind of of her. It does center mostly on Mrs. Bridge, as the title would lead you to expect, and you mainly just see her doing things and hear her saying things. You don't hear that much about her interiority, which I think makes sense, partially because it's written by a young man that maybe he doesn't, I can't think of any novels especially written by men in the perspective of of a woman. I mean, it is third person. It's not in her voice. But I don't know if I need an extended portrait of her interiority to to see something really essential about this character. And I think the same is true for for the siblings to lesser degrees, they're, you know, less important, and we're mainly just seeing them in the kind of mystified way that Mrs. Bridge sees them. I think we really see Mrs. Bridge from her own point of view, in a strange way, where it's like, there are these occasional moments where Mrs. Bridge seems to be having almost kind of a nervous breakdown about something that's pretty small, you know, like she hears a clock, and it's very upsetting to her, or, I don't know, she just looks at her husband and he's kind of placid, and it sets off some kind of terrifying feeling in her that she can't quite name. And then we just leave it at that. We don't probe deeper or see her kind of, like, break down, continue. You don't even really get that much of a sense of her from other people. People are not saying things like, oh, India, you're just like this, or you're whatever, like, no one's ever really, no one ever really seems to see her either. I mean, it's, it's like, amazingly dark and comedic at the same time, right? Yeah. For me, I felt like some of the moments where I learned the most about her kind of got glimpses into another side that wasn't typically seen as in the moments of retreat. So, and by that, I mean, like the moments when she's like, Oh, I'm dead set on learning Spanish, and then there's one interruption, and then it like, goes to the back, or when she's like, dead set on getting psychoanalysis, and she like, oh yeah. She mentions it to her husband. He doesn't hear her, and then he's like, What a ridiculous idea. Or the time when she's like, I'm going to go get the car waxed. This is going to be great. This is going to get me out of my depression, which it was not named as such, but I think we can read as such. And then she talks herself into it, and then something happens that she just breaks it and she never returns. And for me, I was like, Oh, this is showing, like, a condition of your your existence, but also this desire to almost like, get break free from it in some ways, but then falling back into habit and what she knows and what's expected of her as this woman in the 20s, 30s and 40s. So I really, I found those moments quite interesting. Yeah, I definitely did too. I like I had read it right shortly before I wrote my first book. And I think I even quote for I didn't really realize this until I was reading it again. I think actually quote from this book, in my first book, like more than once, which I don't, I haven't gone back to actually look at my at my first novel to see if, when, but I'm pretty sure it was something to do with her friend that I don't think this spoils any don't think it's the type of book that spoils anything, but if you really hate spoilers, like maybe skip ahead. But her friend, Grace Baron, who kills herself. And there's a couple of other women, you know, friends of hers, that seem to be kind of just, this is very pre feminism, having any kind of role in American life, and what was expected and what was possible for a woman was very, very narrow, and there's only a couple of women. I mean, he was even written before, you know, it was written in the in the 50s. So, like, I think there's something really touching about I think that's maybe part of what I connect to so much about it, that is that Connell was able to somehow see some kind of specificity in the women of this world that he grew up in, and even in his mother's sort of being trapped in this life that and he treats it with a lot of like tenderness and humanity, where I feel like none of the women are like caricatures, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of fiction written by men at this time, you know. And also, you know, they're women of a different generation. And I think the fact that he was able to give them some specificity and complexity and mystery, I don't know, I was always kind of moved by that, like you would have thought that would have made me more interested in and con was the human being, but I don't know, the book sort of does it all for me, actually.

Jessica Swoboda  18:07

Right, now, you mentioned these two scenes, the one where Grace Baron, we learned she commit suicide, the other one about the ticking of the clock. And then you also called our attention in an email about the chapter where they go to this wedding where the bride is already pregnant, and then a man named Al calling the house Ruth. And then, of course, the tornado scene. And so I'm wondering, Can we read one of those scenes aloud?

Catherine Lacey  18:33

I guess I'll do the the first. I think the tornado scene is just too long, but it's amazing. It's basically right at the center of the of the book. But I wanted to read two of the chapters because I think it's sort of important to understand how these discrete chunks are both connected to each other and also separate. I feel like there's something really important happening in the transitions, because  there's like 117 chapters in the end. So this one's chapter 64. It's called first babies. 

"That summer, the family was invited to the wedding of relative named Maxwell, who was a postal clerk in the nearby town of olith. Carolyn was the only one who wanted to attend the wedding, but because it was an obligation of sorts, the entire family, except Mr. Bridge drove down to olath. When the bride came down the aisle, they discovered the reason for the wedding. After the ceremony, they put in an appearance at the reception, and then, in silence, drove home. About three months later, they received the traditional announcement concerning the birth of a child. It happened that Ruth, Carolyn and Douglas were at home when this announcement arrived, and Mrs. Bridge, having exclaimed, in spite of her disgust, isn't that nice? Felt it necessary to add first babies are so often premature at this time, Ruth was 18 years old. Carolyn was 16, and Douglas nobody's fool, a shrewd 14 a profound silence, a massive, annihilating silence greeted her remark. Caroline gazed out the window. Douglas became greatly interested in his fingernails. Ruth looked at Caroline, then at Douglas, and she seemed to be considering. Finally, she said, quietly, Oh, Mother, don't none of them said anything further. The Maxwells were not mentioned again." 65, "Who's calling?": "She was kneeling in the garden with a trowel in her hand when Harriet lifted the kitchen window to announce that some man who would not give his name, was on the telephone asking for Ruth. I'll take it. Mrs. Bridge said, getting to her feet, she entered the house and approached the telephone with a feeling of hostility and taking up the receiver more firmly than usual, she said, Hello, Ruth is not in Kansas City at the moment. Who's calling? Please. Where's she at? A deep voice asked Mrs. Bridge signaled Harriet to stop running the vacuum cleaner. Ruth is visiting friends at Lake lodona, who is calling please. What's the number out there? The man demanded, despite his rudeness and obvious coarseness, if she had been inquiring about Carolyn, she would have given him the number at the lake, but she had never liked or trusted the men who came after Ruth. I'm certain she would like to know who called. There was a pause. Mrs. Bridge thought he was going to hang up, but he finally answered tell her, Al called, then he added al lucek, and faintly, from wherever he was came the clink of glasses. For some reason, Ruth's friends always had foreign names. Carolyn's companions were named Bob or Janet or Trudy or Buzz, but there was a malignant sound to Al lucek and to the others, Louis manilos and Nick gajadas, they sounded like gangsters from the north end. Mrs. Bridge had once or twice asked Ruth who they were and how she met them, but Ruth replied evasively that she had simply met them at so and so's house or or at a New Year's Eve party. But what did they do, she asked, and Ruth would shrug. Tom Duncan was asking about you the other day, she would say, but Ruth would not be interested now, she said in cool and civil tones to the man on the telephone, thank you for calling. Mr. Lucek. Immediately, the vacuum roared. Mrs. Bridge was disturbed. Ruth was incomprehensible to her, and with every year, she became more so, more secretive and turbulent, more cunning and inaccessible, more foreign. Where had she come from? How could she be Carolyn's sister, Mrs. Bridge, was deeply worried and found it more and more difficult to call her by the pet names of childhood, and before long, she was unable to call her by any name except Ruth though it sounded formal and distant and tended to magnify their separation, are you mine? She sometimes thought, Is my daughter mine?"

Jessica Swoboda  23:18

Why draw our attention to these passages?

Catherine Lacey  23:21

Well, I think it's the way that second one ends. The "is my daughter mine," where I feel like she's having this sort of extended paranoia about her own children. Ruth in particular. I mean, she has her own baggage with Douglas, which is hilarious also, and it's interesting to see them sort of in conflict. But I, you know, I think the way this is bridges kind of seen as her children really see her as like below them, you know. And she's so committed to her, her, her like naivete and and, and, and so troubled by, like, the minor differences that she has with Ruth. And I think it's just, this is, is my daughter mine? I feel like that's really, you know, are my children mine? Is anything mine? I feel like is sort of the like question that's running through the whole book. And her relationship with Ruth is just really interesting to me. It's like it starts at the very beginning. Like Ruth is described as this baby that is only happy being left alone. And as more and more of my friends have kids, and more and more people in my family have babies running around and stuff, you just see how they come with—they're already exactly who they are at the very beginning. It's terrifying. It's actually, I think there's something, like, the book really peels apart the real terror of parenthood and the kind of strangeness of: you just make one decision and then suddenly there's a stranger living with you for the rest of your life. And Mrs. Bridge, really, as a character, I think rests in that place of apprehension and confusion with her own children. And I don't think we see that many, I don't know. We have, like, different types of mothers, kind of archetypes of mothers, like overbearing or worried or distant, or this or that, but she's kind of none of those. She doesn't fit into any stereotypes. For me, really, the character doesn't... I could have picked, honestly, like any two chapters. I just really wanted to give, like, a sense of how the mood shifts from chapter to chapter. But I had marked way more than I even mentioned to you all. 

Jessica Swoboda  25:44

Are we meant to feel any sympathy for Mrs. Bridge or for the other characters? And I asked this because for so much of this book, I am like, Oh well, I keep finding myself making excuses for some of the things that she's doing or saying or thinking, and then at the same time I'm like, ugh, but of course, I'm reading this in 2025 about a thirties, forties, housewife. Yeah, are we? Are we meant to feel any sympathy for her? 

Catherine Lacey  26:11

Yeah. I mean, the narrative really begins, like, 100 years prior to right now. And I think it's maybe that's part of the reason why it's, you know, I mean, I don't find the book to be dated, but there is, like, an enormous amount of like, her xenophobia and her racism are, like, completely calcified and impossible to ignore. I mean, I remember that being I mean, there's just moments and there you're just like, I mean, I guess you are meant to sort of feel sympathy for her. She was very much a product of her, of her time, and, you know, the place and time that she grew up. But there's mainly, I feel like the faults that Mrs. Bridge has, they really come back to just a sheer ignorance. She's like, she never really was permitted to be a person, you know, and yet her personhood is still is kind of there, sort of like trying to assert itself. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure. I think probably Evan s Connell did want us to feel some kind of sympathy or understanding for this character. I don't think that. I don't think that his perspective as an author is completely agnostic about that or apathetic, I guess I should say, but I'm not sure if I'm really that concerned with like, feeling sympathy for her or not, right? 

Jessica Swoboda  27:32

Yeah, and I found I feel like her daughters, there's moments where her daughters are trying to get her to recognize something about the situation, like, No mom, like in this scene you just read, it's like, No, Mom, don't stop. Don't go there. It's like a classic kind of mother daughter exchange. But it's also like her daughters are trying to pull her out and get her to, like, shift her perspective a little bit and see something new. And we see it again too, when she's making excuses for the abuse that Caroline suffering at the hands of her husband. Oh, god, oh, that chapter just kills me. Yeah, I got there and I was like, Oh no. Like, Mrs. Bridge, why? Like, that's, that's my reaction.

Catherine Lacey  28:05

Yeah, no. Like, just for the listeners, like, that moment. I mean, it's no shock. You would be able to tell in chapter two what's going to happen to these kids. But Carolyn grows up and does the traditional thing and marries very young and has a baby and is with this guy and whatever, and he's abusive. And she comes home and she's kind of like, you know, it's kind of amazing. It's the 1940s, and Carolyn has the wherewithal to leave an abusive situation and come home and be like, I can't forgive him. He's done this thing. And Mrs. Bridge is just like, Well, maybe you did something to provoke him. I mean, it's awful, and she's and Caroline's just like, You know what? You know, like, really, just wants her mother to be supportive of her and, like, not take the side of her abuser, but like, her mom can't do it, you know, she just like to her, it's completely understandable that a husband would beat his wife. It's just like, maybe not great. Like, it's, you don't want to talk about it. It's not like, polite topic of discussion, but it does happen, you know, and she's just like, well, there's nothing we can do about that. That's men. And it's just, you know, you see, you see how trapped she is, that even though, like you, I believe that she loves her children, she it's not that she's not a monster. She's not like, you know, apathetic about them, but she's, she was so trapped in this moment that that she was born into, you know. 

Zach Fine  29:24

The use of the word monster is interesting, because I feel like there were certain moments where I felt like it was something almost monstrous about the about the distance between, you know, the parents and the children that I don't know why that word can actually I think in Mr. Bridge, there is a scene where he's describing something that that there is a kind of moment of alienation, and he uses the word monstrous. Connell uses the word monstrous. So I'm curious if you felt like, does it, does it feel just like kind of normally repressive, kind of distance, or does it actually, does it actually flare into something kind of work or task or extreme for you when you're reading it?

Catherine Lacey  30:06

I mean, maybe this is where I bring my own upbringing into the frame, because I grew up in a house with at one time three but most of the time two other children. I recognize the mood of this domestic space as very similar to the one that I grew up with, and I think even more similar to the ones that my parents grew up with, you know, and as they've told me about what their their own childhoods were like, and my own grandmother, if, like, I see my grandmother in this in Mrs. Bridge, like very clearly, even though she would have been the generation of like, Carolyn or something, I don't know, I guess I can't quite totally see it as monstrous to me. It seems so normal. I mean, I feel like people that grow up, like a lot of my friends that are from Mississippi, that are that still live in Mississippi, but the majority of the friends that I've made as adults, and the majority of the like families that I've gotten to know since I left Mississippi, obviously or not, it's very different. It's a very different world. So I don't know if I could, I don't know if I would bring the word monstrous to it, but I guess by some standards of the kind of enlightened sort of parenting and family stuff that we understand now at this time, it does look kind of hostile, but I don't think it necessarily was. I don't even think that Connell is trying to critique the atmosphere that he grew up in. It's very much about his parents, these two books, and I don't think that he's trying to say they were wrong. I think he's just really trying to convey what they were in this sort of, like, now, it seems completely foreign, like truly foreign world.

Zach Fine  31:56

That's, I'm curious if, when you say, you know, describing the kind of world as it is, one thing that I saw that popped up in a number of descriptions of the two novels is that it's kind of described as mildly satirical, which kind of surprised me, because I thought it was much more even handed in its appraisal or kind of description of that atmosphere. And I'm curious if you sense that satire there, or that kind of mild satire. If that's not there for you? 

Catherine Lacey  32:21

Oh, it's very there for me. I find it very—satire is maybe too strong of a word, but I definitely find it very funny. I mean, I think you're left with no other option, but if you're trying to depict a woman who's completely entrapped in the milieu that she grew up in and has no ability—or chooses not to, or is just simply unable to question it. If you depicted it in purely realist terms, I think it would be unbearably dark. think the humor is really what saves the book. I noticed that a lot in the way that he ends chapters, there's often kind of the joke, or some kind of turn happens at the end of the chapter. Actually, I do laugh a lot when I read this book, but I either, you know it's close, you're close to laughter or actually laughing in every single chapter,

Jessica Swoboda  33:17

You mentioned that you realized you quote Mrs. Bridge in your first book, I think, is that right? And I'm wondering, yeah, how has Mrs. Bridge influenced your writing?

Catherine Lacey  33:28

I think it was really mainly with the first book, because I was looking at all the classics that that I read, that I felt really—I mean, it's really hard, the assignment that you guys have of choosing a book that's been influential to you. Sometimes it's hard to understand which books have been influential to you, or it's been hard for me to quite understand that. I feel like I read things and I think I wasn't affected by it at all. And then later I see its influence, maybe years later, kind of coming out in something. Or it just stays with me in some way. And I had almost forgotten about Mrs. Bridge. I actually just moved all my books from the States back down to Mexico City, where I've been living for a while. But I've been living kind of without my books, without, sort of, I mean, I don't know, I've gotten rid of so many of them now. But anyway, I was able to look back at things that that had meant a lot to me. And it's sort of hard to pick, because there's some authors that I feel like are hugely influential to me, but when I actually look at the text itself, it's hard for me to claim that I've been influenced by this writer in any apparent way. But this one, I think definitely was partially because I was reading it while I was on this long trip to New Zealand, and that trip ended up sort of being the basis for my first novel. It wasn't autobiographical, but it was like the setting itself sort of brought out this story. In my first novel, I wasn't working exactly in the same way that that Connell has used short chapters. But I realized that perhaps the very short chapter, and thinking of every very short chapter as a complete machine with its own sort of internal tensions, and and trying to end in a strange or funny or odd way, and the melding of a very dark plot line with moments of just absurd humor—that, to me, seemed like enough of a rubric for how I could proceed with this book that I was writing. I think when I first started writing that book, I thought I was writing a few short stories or something, and when I just kept on writing stuff, and it kept on sort of growing, I guess I just looked to Mrs. Bridge as the possible format that could help, just like a map. You know, there were a couple other books. I almost thought about reading Alice in Wonderland for this, because that was the other book that I looked at as a kind of rubric for how to complete a first book. But it's not as interesting to me. I mean, it's a beautiful, strange book, but it didn't have enough to it.

Zach Fine  36:14

Something that I, you know, you mentioned at the beginning that something about the setting of Kansas City in this period reminds you of growing up in Mississippi, and I'm in New Orleans right now, and I'm from the south, and my dad lives in Mississippi. And I'm kind of wondering, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot, about kind of southern literature, but I am curious if there is anything about the book that kind of speaks of a certain kind of southern literature to you, or if that category southern literature means anything to you? 

Catherine Lacey

I mean, I think it does. We place Kansas in the Midwest, right? But I think it's at this time period more related to what the South was like around this time. You know, I've hesitated to really write much about Mississippi or the South in general, even though I spent up to the age of 18 living there—or no, up to the age of 22. I went to college in New Orleans. And to me, it's just a minefield. There's so many tropes that you end up coming back to if you start placing things in the South, and there's topics that you necessarily have to work with or work around, that hadn't really been my topics. Like, as I started to write fiction, I think my concerns were elsewhere. I think they're starting to return a little bit more towards the South now. Part of it was I didn't like growing up there. I think I felt very strange, like maybe I relate a little bit to the Ruth character in the book. You get the sense that even as a child, she's like, I think I'm in the wrong place, and then she's just kind of biding her time until she's allowed to leave, which is kind of how I felt. And I've read a lot of Southern literature and but not that much contemporary Southern literature. There's a few great examples, but I just really bristle at some of the tropes, which feel like distractions from the real topics that the South has to offer. And I think readers sometimes get charmed by like, oh, you know, the Spanish moss and the architecture and the food and the people's funny accents and their funny little racisms and, like, whatever. And I just bristle at it. To me, it's a bigger topic. And I think I've not been able to really go there so much.

38:48

Yeah, can we zoom out for a minute, just away from Mrs. Bridge and away from the southern literature, but thinking about contemporary literature, and I'm just curious, like, is there something you wish you saw more of in the current contemporary lit landscape?

Catherine Lacey  39:01

I read a lot of stuff in translation, to be honest, like as I've been looking, I've been realizing it's been, I've been going more and more in that direction. And so, you know, I think when you read outside of just what's being written in American English, a lot of the problems you might see in kind of contemporary literature in this moment sort of cease to be an issue, because there actually is, like a diversity of all kinds of shits being written all over the world in many different formats. And pretty much anything you could want to read is, is there to be read. But if you just read American contemporary literature, I think you will find a lot of things very wanting, partially because of the the economy around the publishing industry, sort of, I think, forces certain kinds of books out and represses other books, or makes it impossible for those writers to even write those sorts of books. Or if they do write them, to get them into the right hands, or, you know, or if they're with a small publisher, it's hard, also hard, for them to just merely exist. And so I do have a lot of problems with American contemporary publishing, but I my my focus is just has become much broader in the last, I don't know, five to 10 years, and I don't have any, I don't have any major complaints. All is well in contemporary publishing on a global scale. 

Zach Fine  40:18

We'll use that quote. That's great. 

Jessica Swoboda  40:22

Well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to talk with you, and I really loved Mrs. Bridge. So I'm so glad to have had the chance to be introduced to it and to read it. 

Catherine Lacey  40:31

I'm so glad you liked it. I yeah, I can't say enough good about it, and hopefully we can spark a Mrs. Bridge Renaissance. 

Jessica Swoboda  40:38

That would be great. 

Zach Fine  40:39

Thanks so much, Catherine.

Jessica Swoboda  40:47

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Selected Novels. We'd like to thank Joe Moss for editing the podcast and John Trevaskis for contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.