BRIDGEPORT BUS

by Maureen Howard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1965

Maureen Howard wrote the attractive, tart-tongued Not A Word About Nightingales. This second novel, which shows no slackening of talent, is rue and wormwood from the first page of the journal of Mary Agnes Keely, who introduces herself as a thirty-five-year-old, five foot eleven virgin with a concave chest. She lives with an aggrieved mother; works in a zipper factory and at night reads the French symbolists or Henry James. But one day she makes a real thing out of a childhood game and takes the Bridgeport Bus, goes to New York, shakes her past, and rents an apartment she shares with a girl who thought of divorcing her mentally disabled husband. The journal, which is a succession of set scenes, some retrospective, finds Mary Agnes falling in love with Stanley Sarnicki, a solid, substantial sort who lives with a mother and sister (they share the same bleach bottle and ""overlapping"" teeth) in Brooklyn; drifting among artists (sleeping with one nameless boy who leaves her pregnant); writing- writing down all the unhappy memories of her ""fruitless tight-mouthed years""; and finally having her child in a home for wayward girls and realizing that ""she had triumphed, that it was no great sin to be, at last, alone."" Somewhat formless as a novel-- but then it's a journal, it is filled with abrasive, abusive insights and observations and a wicked humor. It's another variant of the old spinster joke which is probably the cruellest in the world. This one comes closer to the undistilled desperation of Brian Moore's Judith Hearne than Seymour Epstein's Leah.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1965

ISBN: 0140055665

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1965

Categories: FICTION