Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge made me cry loudly on a train to Penn Station yesterday. If anyone’s looking for a long book that delivers a classic, solid story about love and morals, read it.
Orringer has published just two books, but her work carries an unmistakable, original thumbprint. That’s often a sign that a book's good. For me, the Orringer thumbprint comes from her ethical engagement with life: All of her stories manage to portray a protagonist who resonates because he’s remarkably evolved or moral. Orringer builds characters in fiction a bit like classic Greek sculptors shaped the human body in marble—forming an ideal image that you can aspire to.
Not all novelists mark their thumbprint through ethics. Different novelists explore different aspects of being human. Salinger painted neurotics well; Kafka was good at portraying the tension between man and system; Virginia Woolf was tuned into emotional introverts. Each author’s genius sits with its light in a certain slice of life. Orringer’s insight, I think, happens to be moral. Reading her books leaves me wanting to grow up: to be a less petty, more evolved human being.
What do Orringer’s ethics look like exactly? One trait many of her protagonists share is that even when life is hard, they don’t call themselves the victim. In fact, they take on hard projects or do good deeds even when no one else knows about it. For instance, one character in The Invisible Bridge spends all his money bribing a government official during WWII in order to protect his sister, but he never tells his sister what he’s doing for her. Telling her might upset the ongoing, delicate bribe, and it would cause the sister useless anxiety. So, we watch a kind man lose all his savings because he’s not so small-minded that he needs credit for his deeds on this earth. He builds a moral life on his own incentive.
Orringer’s protagonists are Adult like that: They reach a point in their lives in which they make strong choices without needing approval or calling themselves victims because of the difficulties involved. Another good example comes in her 20-something main character of her novel, Andras. He marries an older woman when he’s young, but then he’s quickly whisked away to war, where he’s beaten, starved, and almost killed several times. A couple times, he’s reunited but taken away from his wife again—and through his hell, he has reason to act out or displace anger onto anyone else in his life, like his wife. But he maintains an uncommonly steady commitment—and that commitment doesn’t come off as unrealistic, either. You just get the sense that in Julie Orringer’s world, when a thoughtful person commits to something, he finds it within himself to own his decision.
Reading Orringer makes me want to be less petty. More reliable. Is there any author you’ve read who inspires some higher ethical imperative in you?
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
