by Thornton Wilder
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1928
Featured on Time Magazine's Top 100
A few weeks ago I wrote a long intro where I doubted the forward-thinking nature of the Pulitzer committee, and how the selection of The Age of Innocence (the third book to win) was an indicator of how the prize would be awarded to "safe" choices over cutting edge literature. Let me walk that back a bit.The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the 10th book to win the Pulitzer, and it is definitely a cutting edge novel.
Thornton Wilder's novel about the lives of the victims of a bridge collapse outside of Lima, Peru in 1714 is a pretty ambitious and inventive work. It is a sort of anti-story, in that there is no central narrative. Instead, the novel is bookended by the story of Brother Juniper. Brother Juniper witnesses the collapse, and feels he must find out the reason why God allowed this accident to befall these specific people. He interviews friends and family of the victims of the collapse in an attempt to find out the character and virtue of those involved, in order to see if there is any sort of moral calculus behind the disaster. The narrator lets us know that the book that Brother Juniper creates is enormous, and sits neglected in a library somewhere. During the opening pages I was expecting to be reading Brother Juniper's novel. Not so. Instead there are three disconnected sections, each dealing with a different person who was killed.
The first is the Marquesa de Montemayor, a wealthy, important, and unhappy woman. The Marquesa has a daughter, and the two have a tumultuous relationship which is tolerable only because the daughter lives in Spain.The second is a man named Esteban, a twin who has recently watched his brother die a horrible and painful death. Finally, there is the story of Uncle Pio, the caretaker of an actress of extraordinary talent and beauty who throws her career away. The stories have some characters that overlap, but the tone of each is easily identifiable. The main thread that runs through all of the stories is a feeling of despair and loss which brings the characters some level of self-actualization. Though the reader understands that each section will end with the death of the character you are reading about, this does not blunt the power of their story, since their death is, in the end, a cosmic whim, and not the result of their actions in life.
I am not overly familiar with Thornton Wilder, except for what is probably his most famous play, Our Town. Both the play and the novel deal with death, both our understanding of death and our relationship with it, in interesting ways. I don't remember Our Town very well, but I remember clearly the female lead of the play watching her friends and family as if through a fog after she had died. I remember thinking that what Wilder was trying to suggest seemed to be that life was an experience almost completely disconnected from death. I also remember thinking that the end of that play was incredibly moving, which is something my wife will probably have something to say about, since I tend to complain if a book or movie has a scene in Heaven. What I find interesting, though, is the thematic connection of this character in Our Town and Brother Juniper, trying desperately to make sense of existence in a way that can be understood on an intellectual level.
There have been two film adaptations made of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and I have not seen either of them. There was one version that was made in 1944 that I know nothing about other than what I have just put down. There was a more recent version made in 2004 which featured a cast of pretty fantastic actors (Robert De Niro, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, and Harvey Keitel to name a few), but I think was something of a mega-flop. So, avoid the movie. Read the book. I would not say that this is a must read, but it was very interesting, and fairly short (so if you find yourself not enjoying it, the experience will be over quickly).
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