Today’s passage from The Bridges of Madison County

Updated on July 10, 2009 By Ken Begg 25 Comments

P. 115

“Robert, when we were making love last night, you said something that I still remember. I kept whispering to you about your power—and my God, you have that. You said, “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” You were right. That’s what you feel; you feel the road inside you. No, more than that, in a way that I’m not certain I can explain, you are the road. In the crack where illusion meets reality, that’s where you are, out there on the road, and the road is you.”

— 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

    How did Clint Eastwood, of all people, come to be associated with a film based on this dreck?

  • He was making a run of popular novel adaptations at the time. Eastwood is a great filmmaker, perhaps our only great filmmaker, and he goes through phases and, luckily, gets bored quickly. That’s why, presumably, he only made two “Any Which Way” movies. And he certainly could have churned out more Dirty Harry movies if he had wished. If he had just stuck with what was working at the time, though, he would have been Burt Reynolds.

    Maybe Eastwood enjoyed the process itself of turning a book into a movie. Maybe he liked how basing a movie on a book streamlined the entire filmmaking process. In any case, Bridges kicked off a series of four popular book adaptions: Bridges, Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and True Crime. Then a pause for Space Cowboys, then back at the books for Blood Work and Mystic River.

    Now Eastwood seems largely off that kick.

  • ERicb

    “In the crack where illusion meets reality, that’s where you are”

    Oh, he’s in a crack alright, firmly embedded in a crack but it’s not the one where illusion meets reality.

  • You are no peregrine, sir; nor all the sails that ever went to sea.

    Good day, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY!

  • I’m disappointed by the severe lack of bridges in both of these excerpts, because if a book promises bridges, I expect bridges, darn it! So far it’s been like “Godzilla VS Megalon”… what, do the bridges show up for about five minutes at the beginning and end of the book?

  • fish eye no miko

    “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.”

    Well, at least he’d modest…
    [rolls eyes]
    (peregrine? Wasn’t he a leopard? What next, a shark? And when does this cross the line into bestiality?)

  • Wonder Bridge powers, activate! Form of — a leopard! Form of — a peregrine!

  • Nathan, you have forgotten you Wonder Twins. It would be “Form of a peregrine! Form of an ice bridge!”

    And when does Gleep show up in the book?

  • Prediction about the next excerpt:

    1. It will mention love making
    2. It will compare him to some animal
    3. It will make vague allusions to his role as a free spirit wanderer
    4. It will develop some half-baked metaphor only to drop it, probably in the same sentence, or mix it with another two or three incompatible metaphors.
    5. It will read like the worst Ed Wood monologue ever, but without the creativity or sincerity
    6. It will feature the words or phrases “dust”, “lonely”, “solitary” or “open spaces” prominently.

    Any takers willing to bet against any of these?

  • sandra

    What tripe! Proof positive, if it was needed, that being on the NY Times Best Seller list is no guarantee of quality. In fact, these days its usually just the opposite.

    Any man who announced that he was a peregrine and all the ships that ever sailed etc wouldn’t make it into MY bed because I’d think he was either delusional or taking drugs!

  • You know, reading this, I simultaneously feel a lot better about some of the bad fanfic I’ve read, and a building rage at the fact that this joker gets published and sells 50 million copies while I still can’t even get read by a legitimate publisher….

    Oh, and I’d say this is never going to cross the line into bestiality. Worstiality, maybe, but not bestiality….

  • andy80

    wow I’ve said a lot of things to get laid, but nothing that dopey!

  • Patrick

    Just a few days ago, I randomly decided to read the Eragon books to do a review/recap sort of thing to them for fun, which meant acquiring a copy, and y’know… I just wonder, when books like these make it to top seller lists, is it out of irony? Are people everywhere telling their friends, “Oh my God, this is the most hilariously inane drivel I’ve ever seen put to a page. You HAVE to get this book!”

    Or maybe it’s all on Oprah. Did she pitch this book? Should we all just blame Oprah?

  • joliet jake blues

    Have a thought for the poor bastard who had to narrate the audoobook though. Trying to keep a straight face whilst declaiming such text can’t be easy.

  • Terrahawk

    Nothing says illiteracy is a benefit than reading a passage like that.

  • P Stroud

    Whodaeverthunk that Nora Roberts would comparatively read like Shakespeare?

  • I think part of the problme is that some potential good writers are caught in the same trap as other modern artists (films being especially relevant) – laboring under the university-taught assumption that things that appeal to the masses must be bad.

    Yet the masses, hungry for tales, and uninterested in stories that don’t pander them (by definition), are forced to buy stuff of perhaps lesser quality, but which at least speaks to some aspect of their being. Jane Austen is accessible (my daughter in law is reading it right nwo). Ernest Hemingway is accessible. But I suspect many of the modern-era Austens and Hemingways are psychological prisoners of post-modernism or Marxist analysis and ahve been rendered incapable of writing anything that any normal person would ever want to read.

  • Ericb

    “I suspect many of the modern-era Austens and Hemingways are psychological prisoners of post-modernism or Marxist analysis”

    Not really. American literary fiction has never been really popular whether you’re talking Hawthorn and Melville in the 19th century or Faulkner and Pynchon in the 20th. There is a long tradition of dense and ostensibly impenetrible fiction in the US as anyone who has picked up Moby Dick expecting a sea adventure can attest. Actually, asside from Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon is pretty accessible, almost a modern Dickens. He’s got a noire novel coming out soon, they may even make a movie out of it.

  • Ericb

    Then you have Neal Stephenson who’s actually pretty popular. The art of good written storytelling isn’t lost it’s just that, for the most part, it has been eclipsed as our culture’s main storytelling device by movies and television. If Dickens came back from the dead and started publishing novels he probably wouldn’t sell much more than Stephenson or Pynchon.

  • Ericb

    Here’s a funny scene from Gravity’s Rainbow. This was the first written work that literally make me laugh out loud when I read it. It’s kinda like William Faulkner meets Monty Python and is about as far as you can get from The Bridges of Madison County.

    http://ssi.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Fun/gravity.html

  • “I had to practically trick my kid into reading ‘The Sea Wolf’ because he’d been trained by years of English class to distrust and fear anything his teachers recommended. This is a fundamental problem, as I see it.”

    Well, yeah, when you put it that way.

  • Poe is popular. Twain is popular. Jack London is popular. Hemingway is popular. I’m not sure by what standards Melville or Hawthorne are to be considered unpopular, as their books have remained in print forever, and have spawned films.

    Sure there have been impenetrable authors of every nation )who reads “The Brothers Karamazon” for fun?) But there have been solidly excellent and accessible writers of all ages as well (Dostoevsky might be hard to handle, but Gogol is certainly not).

    But in recent years I don’t see this trend extending as it did. Perhaps “Gravity’s Rainbow” is a delight, but I’ve never had it presented to me in that way before, so I’ve never read it. My teachers who encouraged me to read it did so by trying to appeal to my inner snob. These are the same guys who wanted me to erad “Things Fall Apart” and “Waiting: A Novel”. I dutifully read those suckers and was sorry I had, despite their comparatively short length. I didn’t feel uplifted nor entertained.

    So I turn to trash to satisfy my soul. Where is my modern-age Jack London, who can be popular and a good writer at the same time? I had to practically trick my kid into reading “The Sea Wolf” becaused he’d been trained by years of English class to distrust and fear anything his teachers recommendced. This is a fundamental problem, as I see it.

  • Ericb

    Melville and Hawthorne were pretty much cult figures in their day. They were hardly best sellers, Melville couldn’t even make a living by writing and died in obscurity, only to became popular in the early 20th century by being championed by highbrow critics and scholars who wanted to build an American literary cannon to rival that of the UK.

    In any event Pynchon does reach my “soul” like no other writers I’ve encountered. Perhaps because I “discovered” him independently rather than having him forced on me by a teacher. He’s not for everyone but he hardly deservers his status as an austere and inaccessible writer. He can be heavy and light hearted and can also be quite sentimental. Mason & Dixon is great “buddy” novel (and not a homosexual inuendo anywhere to be found). Pixar could do worse then puting out a PG-13 version of it on the screen. Pynchon is also big Godzilla fan and had a novel on giant Japanese monsters in the works but this fell by the wayside for some reason. How many “highbrow” writers can you say that about?

  • Ericb

    A correction re Melville, his first two works (which were considered to be non-fiction narratives of his South Sea voyages) Typee and Omoo were popular but once he abandoned these ostensibly factual narratives and moved into pure fiction his audience vanished (except for a small cult following)until he was popularised in the early 20th century (by snobby professors).

  • Yeah, I see what you mean about English teachers. My brother, still a reasonably avid reader (thank goodness) has come to hold the opinion that the best judge of a book’s quality is how much English teachers hate it.

    On the other hand, English class has its purposes. After tearing through To Kill a Mockingbird at record pace, I was able to read Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without interruption (and with the teacher’s blessing) while the rest of the class muddled through Atticus Finch and Boo Radley.