Today’s passage from The Bridges of Madison County

Updated on July 9, 2009 By Ken Begg 7 Comments

P. 92

“His admiration was genuine, she could tell. She reveled in it, bathed in it, let it swirl over her and into the pores of her skin like soft oil from the hands of some deity somewhere who had deserted her years ago and had now returned.

And in that moment, she fell in love with Robert Kincaid, photographer-writer, from Bellingham, Washington, who drove an old pickup truck called Harry.”

— Robert James Waller

Mr. Waller is the author of Bridges of Madison County, which sold over 50,000,000 copies to become one of the most successful books of the 20th Century. Mr. Waller has also written numerous other books, many of which sold several thousands of copies.

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  • Ericb

    That’s some drop, from 50 million to several thousand.

    I usually have no problem with purple prose (when it’s done well) but that stuff is severel levels below awful.

  • The several thousand copies thing is a bit of snark, actually, but clearly no other book of his (including a sequel in 2002!) ever came remotely close to the millions of copies BoMC sold.

  • Ericb

    I can’t hear that book mentioned without remembering a riff from MST3K where over some stock footage of a tank one of the crew says “The Bridges of Madison County, starring Lee Marvin!”

  • There was a sequel? The things I’ve missed by getting out of the used book business.

  • Kirk

    Today’s passage from the Sony HDR-FX7 instruction manual:

    P.130

    White Balance……………38
    WHITE FADER……………..63
    WHT BAL button…………..38
    Wide angle………………33
    WIDE CONV……………….60
    Windows…………………86
    WORLD TIME………………74
    Write-protect tab…..105, 107

    Z
    Zebra…………………..37
    ZEBRA switch…………….37
    Zero set memory button …..49
    Zoom……………………33
    Zoom lever………………33
    Zoom ring……………….33

  • Patrick

    Wow, that first paragraph. It’s like everything after “soft oil” was Mad Libbed in by a very disinterested acquiantance.

    “Okay, I need a mythical being.”
    “I dunno, some deity or something?”
    “All right, and now a place.”
    “Whatever, somewhere. Leave me alone!”

  • Patrick–

    Exactly!!! I was telling someone at work I believed Waller wrote the sentences with the nouns first, and went back later and inserted all the (often random-seeming) adjectives.

    And you zero in on exactly the one word that practically hypnotizes me in that sentence: That “somewhere” after “deity.” It’s not only “some” deity, it’s “some deity somewhere.” That’s the sort of description you make of something common (“I bought that TV shirt at a garage sale somewhere”), not a deity.

    There comes a rare point where certain individuals break through the badness barrier and achieve a sort of mad, inverse genius. To an extent, this site is dedicated to celebrating those rare visionaries. Waller is one of them.