Bridge ... may borrow a weapon, along with a taut style and a slender economy, from James M. Cain, but this is no crime story. Instead, and perhaps incongruously, it is a quiet, interior novel, a character study in which the prose plays a bigger role than the plot. What happens in the story is minimal: San Francisco legal secretary Alice falls in love with her married colleague David, antagonizes her supervisor, Fran, and buys that gun. But how it happens—and how Alice describes it happening—is striking, unsettling and profound ... Alice reminds us of the truth about how hard it can be for anyone who’s really paying attention to survive in a world composed of such extremes of beauty and indifference." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs, Thomas’s 56 brief, linked stories are linguistic tours de force that together form an unsettling character study ... Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the “Goldilocks Zone”: not too crazy, not too sane—a just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and losing it ... Thomas has a gift for using a minimum of words with maximum effect." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"A novel in stories that brings readers deep into the eccentric and neurotic mind of its protagonist. Thomas links these 56 stories with a consistent voice. Alice—a lonely, at times suicidal woman—narrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit ... Thomas’ prose in these episodic vignettes is tight and vivid. In each two-to-three page installment, solipsistic Alice is given black humor and memorable one-liners ... With emotional resonance, an innovative structure and a unique narrator, Thomas crafts a book that's greater than the sum of its parts." —Kirkus Review
“Made up of fifty-six two-to-five page exercises in associative thinking—vibrant thought connecting vibrant thought—Robert Thomas's first novel Bridge will delight the more experimentally inclined, analytical reader. Bridge is an engaging, meandering exploration of the mind of the novel's protagonist, Alice, as she struggles with thoughts of suicide; her affection for her married co-worker, David; and her antagonistic relationship with her supervisor, Fran.” —Bookslut
“Ever wonder what that quiet girl in the office is thinking? The serial monologues of Alice, self-described as an ‘irrational prime number,’ place us inside a wholly original, slightly suicidal, radically unconventional mind: precariously balanced, yet how far down she can see without falling. In this poet’s tour de force fiction, Thomas’ imaginative language created in me, to transplant his phrase, ‘what medical books accurately term prolonged dazzle.’” —Eleanor Wilner, Ploughshares
"If you’re not stunned by the language of this poet’s novel, you will be by the plot, a monologue of suspense and grief; or by the narrator, the painfully smart and self-aware Alice." —Laurie Greer, Politics and Prose
"Robert Thomas won the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction for Bridge, which I buy, as this book is without a doubt worthy of such awards. In this collection, or whatever you call it, Thomas explores a human who has put herself in a disastrous situation, one that is awful, but perhaps better than her other options, which seem to be nothing. Alice is so well drawn, it gets more and more painful to work through Thomas’ book, as her sadness, her quest for happiness, make the hopelessness of plight more apparent with each detail." — Story 366
2014-08-04
A novel in stories that brings readers deep into the eccentric and neurotic mind of its protagonist.Thomas (Dragging the Lake, 2006, etc.) links these 56 stories with a consistent voice. Alice—a lonely, at times suicidal woman—narrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit. She's a word processor at a law firm, a job she compares to being a paramedic: "somewhere between an emergency room resident and a taxi driver." Thomas' prose in these episodic vignettes is tight and vivid. In each two-to-three page installment, solipsistic Alice is given black humor and memorable one-liners. In "¿Qué Pasó?" she recounts a short interaction with a co-worker and examines issues of love, power and language. She determines, "[n]othing is as infuriating as someone who acts as if they're just saying something and not doing something by saying it." These sharp observations are characteristic of Alice's perspective. As she looks at the Golden Gate Bridge, thinks about marine biology and discusses opera, she considers the soul, consequences and death. In "Capital Punishment," she notes, "[s]ometimes suicide is nothing more than a way of saying ‘No, actually I was not being ironic. I meant it.' " In "Naming a Baby," she remembers one particularly biting comment her mother made about her grandmother's cooking. She decides, "[t]hat's the worst, isn't it? To take the one thing someone does well, the one wildflower that barely survives in the shadow of their mountain of mediocrities, and tell them that's it, that's what I hate about you." To a reader looking for an action-packed plot, Alice's digressions and the extreme interiority of the book might become exhausting. But there is a payoff; the stories function as building blocks that fit within an overarching narrative. They proceed chronologically as Alice's depression intensifies and she struggles to find a way out from her abyss.With emotional resonance, an innovative structure and a unique narrator, Thomas crafts a book that's greater than the sum of its parts.
