The Bridges of Madison County

Title: The Bridges of Madison County
Author: Robert James Waller
Pub Date: 1992
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A photographer and an Iowa housewife engage in a passionate and brief affair in the summer of 1965.

At one time, this book would have fallen into what I call "housewife porn." And in a way, I suppose it still does. There are certainly elements of romance to it that appeal to a woman--especially a woman with responsibilities who might find herself a bit bored with normal life. But reading it now (for the first time--I saw the movie years ago and liked it fine. I'll watch about anything Meryl Streep does, and I thought the cinematography was lovely), this is much more a story for and by an older man than any kind of narrative meant for a woman, whatever its audience ended up being. 

I'm not going to go all feminist critique up in here. I'm pretty far out of school for that (thank goodness). But, for all this is ostensibly a narrative told about and ultimately by a woman, this is very much about a man. It reeks of it, especially after a certain point.

I don't think I'm going to be giving much away, here. The movie was huge, and the book is hardly coy about what ultimately happens. It's a very short read (took me maybe two hours all told), so you're going to know what happens fairly quickly, even if you somehow don't already. Francesca Johnson, age 45, lives on an Iowa farm with her husband and two children. One summer afternoon while her family is away at the Iowa State Fair showing a steer that got way more attention than she did, she meets photographer Robert Kincaid, age 52, who is in Iowa taking photos of covered bridges. Kincaid is everything her husband is not--complex where he is simple, thoughtful where he is careless, poetic where he is dull. And lo, they fall in the sort of love that only ever really happens in fiction, where they cannot separate themselves from the other and they become some other thing entirely. 

Let it not be said that I am not a romantic, for indeed I most certainly am. I found the love of my life at the age of 30 and I am still with him five years later, still every bit as much in love with him now as I was then, and we are gloriously happy together. I left behind more than a few obligations and responsibilities to be with him, because I had to. To not be with him was quite frankly not an option. And non, je ne regrette rien. So don't tell me about certainty and love, Robert James Waller. I know quite a bit. But if my love, this man, ever spouts off something like, "I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea," I would probably ask if he had maybe had some kind of drug interaction. If he said it during sex, I would honestly fear an aneurysm. Because people--and I don't care how old you are or how many places you've been--people do not talk like that outside their own heads unless they've ingested enough substances that I don't think sex would be on the table at that point. 

But this guy, Robert Kincaid, is the last of a dying breed. He's a shaman. He's a wanderer. He's -- as soon as they start having sex, any narrative drive Francesca had in the book ceases and everything shifts over to him and his bizarre cowboy fantasies about being on the dead end of an evolutionary chain. It's not until he leaves that it returns to her. It's very odd, for all it's supposed to be from her journals. 

And in the end, this book isn't about Francesca. She is merely the necessary object to be acted upon and against and through in order for him, Robert Kincaid, to have his experience. It could have been anyone, it happened to be her. Anything interesting about her as a person sort of vanishes in the middle of the book and never exactly comes back. It's frustrating. This isn't as much housewife porn as it is exceptionalist old guy porn, in a way. It's inoffensive, to be sure. The writing is lovely, and the setting is evocative. It's a very fast read, and you could certainly do worse for yourself on a lazy afternoon. But it left a weird taste in my mouth all the same.