Robert James Waller (1939–2017)

I really enjoyed the first half of this book: an engaging, detailed character study of two fully-realized individuals. The writing was poetic and straightforward. In the second half of the book, the writing lost some of its charm. What was poetic became schmaltzy and overwrought, and I couldn't help but feel frustrated with the characters' choices. Quick read.

Pain, immeasurable pain.
I don’t understand what I got myself into here, I was completely unprepared for the intense romance I got to be a part of.

A deep representation of the phrase ‘it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all’ and frankly, I'm not sure that’s true anymore.

Robert and Francesca are wonderful characters, and I especially loved the bit at the end by the jazz player.
But this has left me with such a profound sadness and longing, I had to knock a show more star off.

I recommend, if you like to inflict yourself with a little bit of suffering, as a treat. show less

First of all - I'm all but a romance reader. I don't feel anything but cringe when reading romances, especially male writer's attempts to capture women's feelings. But this one is different, and I am heavily biased.

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller is a tender, poignant love story set against the tranquil backdrop of rural Iowa. The narrative explores the intense connection between Robert Kincaid, a 52-year-old National Geographic photographer, and Francesca Johnson, a show more 45-year-old Italian-born housewife. The story unfolds over four days of passion and self-discovery, leaving an indelible mark on both characters. It's a story about human emotions, the weight of societal expectations, and the transformative power of love.

The story is deeply reflective, particularly in how it handles themes of aging and longing and the bittersweet reality of missed opportunities. Although Waller naturally focuses more on the character of Robert Kincaid (who, let's face it, bears some similarities such as the name, age, and even a similar look to the author), it's Francesca's reflection on her life choices that is particularly powerful. Her realization that although she cannot seriously complain about her life "it's not what I dreamed about as a girl" is a universal sentiment, striking a chord with anyone who has ever wondered about the road not taken. show less

Love, loss, and sacrifice

Sacrificing something for love is one thing.
Sacrificing love itself is quite another.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
The book suggests it is, for both Francesca and Robert, but I can’t agree.

In my mid teens, I planned to change my name to Francesca when I turned 18. Despite my ambivalence about this story, part of me still wants to be Francesca, taking a different path.

Image: A heart in fractured concrete (Source)

Layers of show more truth and fiction

For years, I vaguely knew of the 1995 film starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood but thought it was about Mr and Mrs Bridges of Madison County. By the time I read this, I knew it was about actual bridges, and that it was a love story, but little else.

“There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.”
The 1965 meeting of farmer’s wife, Francesca Johnson, and National Geographic photographer, Robert Kincaid, is framed as a true story, discovered by her adult children, when they find journals, mementos, letters, and a photo after her death in 1989. They ask the author to write this book. It’s a valid literary device that’s as fictitious as Francesa and Kincaid.

They share quotes from a real poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats, HERE. New fictions are also included: an odd and ethereal piece, Falling from Dimension Z, in which Kincaid explores his feelings for Francesa, as well as an interview with a jazz musician who befriended Kincaid in his final years. All part of the (meta)fiction blend.

However, Robert James Waller, the actual author, was a keen photographer and musician, like his fictional Robert. He wrote The Madison County Waltz about this story. You can watch him performing it on the Roseman Bridge, HERE, where he even looks like Kincaid.

Waller had previously written a song about the dreams of a woman called Francesca. Sometime later, he was photographing bridges, and put the two together. He said he wrote the book in eleven days.

Madison County really is known for its covered bridges. Those named in the book are real: see HERE. The covers were made of cheap timber, supposedly to protect the more expensive flooring - yet some of them are only partly covered. I think they’re all rather ugly, and too visually intrusive for a rural landscape.

Image: Roseman Bridge, Madison County (Source)

Only 2* from me

I went through a range of emotions and responses reading this:

• Compositionally, it’s uneven (the main story is okay and has a framing story, but the various bits appended don’t really fit, and the chapter titles are strange).
• There are minor surprises beneath a broadly predictable plot arc.
• At times, it’s tender and subtle. Quiet tension is done well. Sometimes.
• The dialogue is plausible when it’s minimal, but not when it’s overly introspective and analytical.
• Several times, especially towards the end, I was moved, but simultaneously felt manipulated by the author's overwriting and purple prose. Perhaps I’m just not used to romance novels:
“She had become a woman again… turning for home toward a place she’d never been.”
• I don’t get why a photographer, albeit a “shamanlike” free spirit, sees himself as “one of the last cowboys”, devoted to “the old ways”, let alone why it was such a big deal.
• I don’t believe the timeframe (lifelong love within hours, and a total of only four days together), but maybe that’s a failure of my imagination and experience.
• I don’t want to believe a mother would write in such detail in a letter to her children: poor things!
• Talking about sex with quasi-spiritual fluff and animal metaphors that went beyond the hot, into the odd, didn’t work for me: I was alternately baffled, amused, and mildly repulsed. See quotes, below.

Quotes

• “He began to see that light was what he photographed, not objects.”

• “Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together.”

• “Like some animal courting rite in an old zoology text… licking her as some fine leopard might do in the long grass out in the veld… It was far beyond the physical… It was spiritual, but it wasn’t trite… It was almost as if he had taken possession of her, in all of her dimensions.” [Ummm and ugh]

• “The leopard swept over her, again and again and yet again, like a long prairie wind, and rolling beneath him, she rode on that wind like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.” [LOL: how do you ride beneath, and what’s a compliant fire?!]

• “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” [Huh?]

Image: Peregrine falcon, in bronze, by Gé Pellini (Source) show less