133 pages
Published 1927
Read from December 2 to December 3
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Growing up a white child in the 1980s and ’90s, one with a particularly controlling and paranoid parent at that, I subsisted on a steady diet of “canon” classics. The authors were comprehensively white and overwhelmingly male, though one Shelley did sneak in among the Wellses, Vernes, Twains, and Doyles. I also had a clear sense that there was another layer of “classics” awaiting me in adulthood, a stodgier and more respectable “canon” from the early twentieth century, books that might get referenced or parodied enough in cartoons for me to be aware of them, but with a vague sense that they weren’t “for” me.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey fits into this category. As a kid, I knew of it by name, but I had no inkling of its plot — or its length, which is one reason I decided to check it out — until I found it the other day while browsing the library. If you didn't know it either, Bridge is a series of interconnected character sketches that converge upon the titular footbridge and its fatal collapse. A Franciscan monk who happened to witness the collapse investigates the lives of the victims, seeking to prove the justice of his god in their fates.
The theological detective angle turns out to be little more than a framing device. The individual stories are about what you'd expect for a lauded 1920s literary outing, delicately teasing apart the victims' obsessions and unhealthy attachments, with a moderate amount of ethnic stereotyping (though less than one might expect). The prose is crisply modernist, detached and faintly ironic. On the whole, I’d say Bridge holds up pretty well. Unlike a certain bridge.
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