Bridge

Starred review from August 18, 2014
Crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs, Thomas’s 56 brief, linked stories are linguistic tours de force that together form an unsettling character study. You’d pass her on the street and never notice Alice, who works in the word-processing department of a San Francisco law firm by day, and attends the opera, watches movies, or, home alone, listens to the voices in her head during off-hours. Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the “Goldilocks Zone”: not too crazy, not too sane—a just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and losing it. Anticipating an affair with a married coworker, she immediately wants a baby once they begin seeing each other. Contemplating problems with her boss, she takes solace from carrying a gun. Alternately suicidal, murderous, funny, and vulnerable, Alice describes herself as an irrational prime number; a jury of her peers would include one inarticulate juror, one confused, and one a danger to himself and others. In a particularly virulent and memorable riff, she mocks the illusory link between cause and effect. In “Bridge” she envisions jumping off the Golden Gate; in “The Rock” she conjures up an escape from Alcatraz. Poet Thomas (Door to Door) has a gift for using a minimum of words with maximum effect. In this slim linked-stories-monologue, he depicts the deeply disturbing inner world of someone you might see on a city bus or coming out of a restaurant.

August 15, 2014
A novel in stories that brings readers deep into the eccentric and neurotic mind of its protagonist.Thomas (Dragging the Lake, 2006, etc.) links these 56 stories with a consistent voice. Alice-a lonely, at times suicidal woman-narrates the minutiae of her life with insight and wit. She's a word processor at a law firm, a job she compares to being a paramedic: "somewhere between an emergency room resident and a taxi driver." Thomas' prose in these episodic vignettes is tight and vivid. In each two-to-three page installment, solipsistic Alice is given black humor and memorable one-liners. In "Que Paso?" she recounts a short interaction with a co-worker and examines issues of love, power and language. She determines, "[n]othing is as infuriating as someone who acts as if they're just saying something and not doing something by saying it." These sharp observations are characteristic of Alice's perspective. As she looks at the Golden Gate Bridge, thinks about marine biology and discusses opera, she considers the soul, consequences and death. In "Capital Punishment," she notes, "[s]ometimes suicide is nothing more than a way of saying 'No, actually I was not being ironic. I meant it.' " In "Naming a Baby," she remembers one particularly biting comment her mother made about her grandmother's cooking. She decides, "[t]hat's the worst, isn't it? To take the one thing someone does well, the one wildflower that barely survives in the shadow of their mountain of mediocrities, and tell them that's it, that's what I hate about you." To a reader looking for an action-packed plot, Alice's digressions and the extreme interiority of the book might become exhausting. But there is a payoff; the stories function as building blocks that fit within an overarching narrative. They proceed chronologically as Alice's depression intensifies and she struggles to find a way out from her abyss.With emotional resonance, an innovative structure and a unique narrator, Thomas crafts a book that's greater than the sum of its parts.

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