We Came Along with a Hammer

An overlooked classic! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, willya look at that! The Bridge of San Luis Rey is that thing I’d been partly hoping all these old Pulitzers would be: awesome books unjustly forgotten. I say partly because — if I’m honest — I was all along suspecting that some of these novels would be a bit terrible, this justifying the choice of title for this blog. But having read about ten and having most of them terrible and a few mediocre, with one outright classic (Age of Innocence), it was a real relief to find that there’d be a book I’d like before we got to, say Kavalier and Clay, 80 (god help us) books or so from now.

Of course, it might be a bit much to call Bridge overlooked; it’s been made into a movie several times, once fairly recently, and the library where I checked it out had about a dozen copies on hand; apparently it’s a poplar — that is, short — book for high school English classes. Still, though I’d heard of Wilder before thanks to Our Town, I had no real idea what the book was about. Perhaps I had a vague idea of a cross between the Treasure of the Sierra Madre and A Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Turns out it’s more like a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ship of Fools. In colonial Peru, a rope bridge over an Andean gorge collapses, killing five people. A young priest witnesses the accident and sets out to discover what led to those five people being on the bridge at that time, viewing it as a natural moral experiment, a sort of cryptogram from God. The book is the result, although there seems to be a distinction between the narrator of the book and the good friar; more than once the narrator says that he is privy to facts the priest never uncovered, and the book frequently delves into the thoughts of the characters in a way a strict third person narrator could not.

Said characters are: The Marquesa de Montemayor; her servant, Pepita; Esteban, a scribe; Uncle Pio, a man about town and manager of the famous actress Camila Perichole, and La Perichole’s young son, Don Jaime.

The Marquesa is elderly and eccentric, a well-known figure about town who is estranged from her only child, a daughter now living in Spain. The Marquesa devotes the whole of her life to writing letters to her daughter, going out into society strictly for the purpose of collecting material, seeking to win by her wit her daughter’s admiration, and soften her heart by the sheer power of eloquence.

Her servant, Pepita, is an orphan, raised in a convent, where she was the apple of the abbesses’ eye. The mother superior deliberately placed the girl in the Marquesa’s service as a kind of training exercise, hoping to get the Marquesa to donate to the convent and also grooming Pepita to move in upper class circles and gain the persuasive skills she will need to take over the running of the orphanage. Pepita, however, is not privy to the Abbess’ plans and is often overwhelmed in trying to care for the slightly cracked Marquesa.

Esteban was also an orphan, but he had a twin brother, Manuel. The two had been inseparable, until and illness (brought on, indirectly, by love) killed Manuel, leaving Esteban so bereft he contemplates suicide. A kindly Captain in the merchant marine takes pity on him and persuades the young man to take a berth on his boat.

Uncle Pio has spent the last few decades of his life making Perichole a star, after spotting her singing on the street as a young kid. So wrapped up in her does he become that it’s unclear whether he wants to be her father or her lover or what. As it turns out, he ends up neither: They suffer a falling out after the actress catches smallpox, bringing her stage career to an end. Pio, however, offers to help bring up her boy, Don Jaime, an offer La Perichole takes up.

Such scanty paragraphs suffice to describe the motives and much of the action of the book; given that the bugger leads off with the conclusion, and so there can be no mystery as to how it ends, it must be difficult to get an inkling of why I’d call the book a classic. That’s because it’s a book of mood and not motion, scene upon little scene that tries to tell you who the characters were and how they felt while leaving rather blurry what they did and when they did it: The exact period when it’s set, precisely how many years elapse between given events, the ages of the characters, all this is merely hinted at rather than nailed down. It strives for timelessness, for the qualities of a fable, and mostly achieves them, without being overwrought. This is quite a difficult trick; Jorge Luis Borges managed it time and again, but usually for ten pages, always for fewer than 30, often for just four. To pull it off at book length without getting cutesy or faux-mystical is quite an accomplishment. Instead, the tone is of restrained sadness, lyric, mournful, dry. By changing the question of the book from the more usual “What happens to these characters?” to “Whether or not the characters get what they deserve,” Wilder manages to drive the reader onward using cool-eyed ambiguity rather than the spur of revelation followed by resolution.

This entry was posted on May 27, 2009 at 5:25 am and is filed under The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags bridge of san luis rey, wilder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.