It is a brilliant book, you won't regret it, but if you're still unconvinced then please read on.
Whether Bachelder had read this novel from 1959 before writing his own I have no idea but it shares that same structure: short chapters with their own titles, snapshots of a life lived (and here it is much more of a life, Abbott was only granted three months but we get to see the entire marriage of Mrs Bridge), which come together to create a ' pointillist portrait' of a woman and an era that is very much in the past and yet so easy for us to connect to thanks to Connell's sensitive handling of his creation.Īll I can do in writing this post is to say quite simply that the book deserves its title of modern classic, tell you that it's an immensely enjoyable read and then give you extract after extract to demonstrate my point so if you want to skip all that and just go and order yourself a copy then I won't be offended at all. One of that novel's own images was of a window segmented into many panes so that the view outside was separated into many distinct pictures - 'There is not one pane that is not beautiful'.
Short chapters, often of only a page or so, revealed little nuggets of insight. You may remember my enthusiastic review for Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits back in March, but if you don't then one of the joys of that book was its structure.
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