Love Is A Bridge

For a first novel by a twenty-three year old author, Love Is a Bridge is a remarkable accomplishment. The book has a mature perspective and a polish in writing and construction rare in the work of more experienced novelists. Simply as a novel, however, Love Is a Bridge has two failings. The first, lack of depth in the characterizations, is perhaps not surprising in so young an author. The second, a placid mellowness of approach, is curious precisely because of the author's youth.

A former Ibis of the Lampoon, Charles Bracelen Flood '51 began his novel in Professor MacLeish's course, writing about the world he knows best--an exclusive milieu of Oyster Bay, Marlborough Street, Northeast Harbor. Mr. Flood is too much a product of this world to be rewarding to critics intent on the game of pinning the tale on other authors. Except for a brief glimpse of the Tycoon in his Wall Street lair, there is no trace of Fitzgerald's awe in the book's pictures of the twenties. Nor does Mr. Flood have any of Marquand Sr.'s quiet grudge or Marquand Jr.'s compulsion to renounce loudly the world of wealth and position. Mr. Flood's even perspective, whether it be laid to ignorance of any other setting, or correctly, I think, to his maturity, is refreshing in its calm acceptance, rather than scorn or worship, of the club at Harvard, debut rituals, codes of tradition. In the social frame which the novel gives its characters, there is far more depth than in the characters themselves.

While the milieu of the novel commonly attracts readers by its elegance, it must appeal to a novelist for the neatly tailored setting it provides for any plot. Financially and socially secure, its inhabitants are free from drearier worries and can afford to find their problems solely on the intriguing plane of personal relationships. This is the focus of Love Is a Bridge, showing the barriers of pride, frustration, and selfishness which isolate one person from another. Separating each individual, Mr. Flood seems to say, there is a natural gap which only the warmth and understanding of love can bridge. Spanning twenty-five years, the novel finds Henry Cobb at Harvard in 1927 and follows him through the wrecks of two marriages. The first, to Susan, collapses because their love is not mature enough to bridge two islands of pride. The second, to Alice, founders because they are drawn together only by loneliness, with longings too disparate for any bridge. Telling the story with an artful flashback, the novel flows smoothly to a full-circle ending, with Henry's son at Harvard and Henry's re-union with Susan in the exact setting of their first meeting.

This search for understanding, poignant in conception, is, however, less moving than it should be. Partially, the fault lies in the characters. Introduced as "that potentially most volatile of all beings, a romantic scientist," Henry shows little of the imagination which Mr. Flood attributes to him. After the brief enthusiasms of his trips to Europe and his love for Susan, he retreats into a quiet resignation, plodding in its dullness. Similarly drab, Susan is treated so much as a symbol of Boston propriety that she seems brittle and unappealing, while the contradictions of character which make Alice more interesting, are given very vague expression. Far more affecting than these three is the benign figure of Henry's father, who for all his omniscience, is an attractive and bodied character.

The flatness of the characters, however, is really only one expression of the larger fault of the book. Dulling the whole effect of Love Is a Bridge is a degree of maturity in the author which is almost distressing to find in a first novel. The mellowness with which Mr. Flood tells his story, with absence of any intensity in episode or character, does not transmit the feeling inherent in the novel's conception. He describes even the most chilling events of his story--Henry's breakdown, the ruin of his first marriage, the dry-rot of his second--with a placidity which seems to confide to the reader that all will work out happily. As a result, the affirmation of man's capacity for love and understanding which the whole novel represents--in its story, characters, and mood--is not impressive. The affirmation lacks force, for there is never really a hint of negation.