More than just camera-shy and subdued, he avoided anything that resembled a traditional career, and-writing almost always on spec, without a contract-was uninterested in developing a literary brand. That’s why the journalist Steve Paul, in “ Literary Alchemist,” the first biography of Connell, mounts a “reclamation project” for the writer’s legacy.Ĭonnell, who died in 2013, is in part to blame for his own obscurity. Yet, in spite of admirers like Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, the Bridge novels-as well as Connell’s nearly twenty other books-are not so much underrated as underread. Bridge’s stern, bigoted, but not unfeeling husband, Walter, Connell gives us two of the very finest, and very saddest, twentieth-century portraits of white bourgeois American domesticity. Bridge” (1969), which revisits the family from the perspective of Mrs. “It’s all frighteningly good,” John Updike told Connell in a letter. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.ĭorothy Parker wrote, in Esquire, that Connell “never did anything that was not perfect” in the novel. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it.
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