A novel with a thin surface and vast depths : Mrs. Bridge

It's amazing that Evan S. Connell's "Mrs. Bridge" seems on the surface like such a placid novel but then when you're finished and you think about some of the incidents it contains you realize that it's a very violent, almost traumatic book: a double murder, an armed robbery, a suicide, a tornado, two (at least) incidents of domestic violence. In the background, there's the onset of World War II, fears about the Holocaust, the racial tensions in the city - but this stays in the background. Mrs. Bridge tries to make the best of everything; she expects manners and social conventions to see her through. She questions nothing. She cannot spot, or is unwilling to recognize, fraud, foolishness (her minister), and injustice. She will do almost anything to avoid conflict. And yet: there is incredible anguish in her soul and in her world, which she touches on from time to time and which is revealed to us in occasional flashes. Only a thin line separates Mrs. Bridge with her calm demeanor from her friend (Grace?) who feels empty, who sees no future, who takes her life (though no one will talk about this). This is a novel with thin surface and vast, frightening depths. It would be so easy to dismiss Mrs. Bridge, and in some ways she is pathetic, her life just passing by her, by the end her husband gone and her children are strangers, but in other ways she is rich, perceptive, and of course a victim. Her husband is a cipher, but he has his own novel, which presumably finds depths of anguish and despair that Connell barely hints at in this one.