At his best, Evan S. Connell is a literary alchemist, turning commonplace elements into gold. In Mrs. Bridge (1959) and its sequel, Mr. Bridge (1969)—two of the finest American novels to appear since the Second World War—he captivatingly chronicles the married lives of an upper-middle-class Kansas City couple based on his parents. One might describe these novels, set mostly during the 1930s, as studies in orthodoxy, for Walter and India Bridge are essentially sober, sensible, and practical-minded bourgeois gentlefolk to whom the defiance of social convention is virtually equivalent to an infraction of moral law—people who, despite their occasional moments of passion or transcendence, and their real (if rudimentary) curiosity about people and places beyond their ken, cannot conceive of an existence not founded firmly on Middle-American Protestant values. (As we learn on the opening page of the 1969 novel, Mr. Bridge decides early on that he is “an attorney rather than a poet” and should “never pretend to be what he was not.”) The Bridges, in short, lead supremely ordinary lives, he as a lawyer, she as a housewife; but out of these ordinary lives Connell creates something of extraordinary beauty, his severely plain and unpretentious—though consistently graceful—prose exerting a remarkable poetic force. He is no Steinbeck or Saroyan, sentimentally forcing meaning upon his characters’ lives and putting implausibly poetic words in their mouths; nor is he an Ann Beattie, wearing one down with meaningless catalogues of household items and reams of vapid chatter.

Rather, by means