The Bridge of San Luis Rey is getting play with a new biography of the author. It won the pulitzer, but I found it unreadable and silly.
Is it a good book? I feel bad somehow that I am missing the point. It was an ‘international sensation’ although I recall reading more recent criticism where they mentioned how overrated the book was and how it is hardly read.
So what is da straight dope?
[Ooops sorry meant to post in Cafe . . . ]
(“The author” of course being Thornton Wilder, who is perhaps best known for his play Our Town)
I read it years ago and was underwhelmed. I don’t remember it too well, but I didn’t think it lived up to the hype.
I much preferred some of his lighter, less pretentious works, like Theophilus North and Heaven’s My Destination.
Unreadable and silly? Really? It’s been a while but I found it profoundly moving. Here is a tragic news story that you might read in the paper any day, a bridge collapse that kills five people. The book then takes you into the lives of the people who were killed and why they were on that bridge and where they were going. Some are running away, some are seeking happiness, and some are just going about their business when the bridge collapses. They are more than just names in the newspaper or accident statistics; they have lives and loves and feelings. This is not one tragedy; each life lost is a tragedy unto itself.
Brother Juniper attempts to see some rhyme or reason in the event and why God took those people and not others, a behavior that we do every time something like this happens. Why do some people live and others die? Is there a plan or a reckoning we can puzzle out of these events? We try and try to see the patterns in the rubble, hoping to make some sense of our own lives.
At the risk of appearing hyperbolic here, when I witnessed the events of 9/11 and the fall of the towers specifically, one of the first things I thought of was this book. Each of those almost 3000 people had a story that led them to this building or that airplane that morning, each one going about their daily business or on some errand of happiness or sorrow or something other concatenation of circumstances that put them in that spot at that time. And we still try to see the sense of it, to understand why good people died and what for. To me, that’s what the book is about, and what makes it worth the read.
Good? Probably. I can say that I enjoyed it. But, as with many books that I have liked at different times in my life, the specifics of the moment lined up well. I was in a third-world country and was doing a great deal of people watching - all of which lined up well with Bridge of San Luis Rey.
It is not a powerful action yarn, nor romance book by any stretch of the imagination. I think it tends to be a bit plodding but well written. As I said, I enjoyed it…but I was in the right place both physically and intellectually for it.
I found it a good book, though somewhat dated (it was written in the 1920’s). So it incorporates attitudes from before the modern world. Of course, the main points remain valid-a well-meaning priest seeks to understand some aspect of the Divine Plan-but reaches no conclusion, except that the “Divine Plan” remains unknowable.
This is pretty much what all Christian philosophers have concluded.
I was underwhelmed.
Well said, Gyrate - that was my experience of the book as well.
A more modern example of the same genre is Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire (1992), the author’s detailed investigation of a 1949 fire in Mann Gulch, Montana, that killed 13 Forest Service firefighters. Maclean used science where Brother Juniper used theology, but the premise was the same: a meditation on what circumstances led those men to that death on that day.
Another book directly influenced by the subject of the thread would be John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Hersey was looking for a way to approach giving an account of survivors of the bombing, and when he recalled the structure of Bridge knew it was what he needed.
It was yet another in a long list of books that I was supposed to read in school, and which I read maybe a paragraph or two of, before deciding to fake a book report about it. Somehow I graduated high school.