What is Pamela Erens reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Pamela Erens, author of the novel, The Understory, which won the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.

Erens's short fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Upstreet, Skidrow Penthouse and Redivider. She will be featured in the short-story anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

One book mentioned in her entry:

Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, written in 1959. I’d already read the sequel to this book, the longer Mr. Bridge, and I think Mrs. B is even better. The novel is constructed as a series of very short chapters about an upper-middle-class, Midwestern family between the 1920s and the early 1940s. The effect is that of a mosaic, although the progression is linear, beginning with Mrs. Bridge’s marriage, moving through the childhood and adolescence of her three children, and ending when everyone has flown the coop. What’s astonishing about the Bridge books is that the Bridges and their neighbors live such ordinary, even stultifying, lives, and yet reading about them is completely absorbing. Connell’s success here is partly due to his gift for compression, but it also has to do with his compassion for his characters, his sly humor, and his ability to plug into deep and universal currents of feeling that his characters can hardly name, much less freely acknowledge. The bewilderment and loneliness that Mrs. Bridge so often experiences in the midst of her very proper life is somehow also mine, living though I do decades later and within a completely different set of circumstances. I read this short book quickly and with delight but when I was done I felt a terrible grief. [read on]

Visit Pamela Erens's website to read more about The Understory and her short stories, essays, and journalism.

Writers Read: Pamela Erens.

--Marshal Zeringue