Don’t ask me why, but this is the second book I read this past year that has been adapted into a Broadway musical. That might not seem too strange given that many beloved musicals are based on books (Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, among others).

So why does it seem strange that I read two (in a row, I might add) books that were the basis of musicals? Probably because they are the most out of pocket musicals I could have chosen: Fun Home and The Bridges of Madison County. Fun Home was excellent, a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel that chronicles her tender, fraught relationship with her closeted father alongside her growing understanding of her own sexuality. Nuanced, funny, incredibly deep, it was such a joy to read. 

If Fun Home was a full three course meal of human feeling and reflection, then The Bridges of Madison County was a Milky Way bar left in the car in August. 

Look, maybe I am not the best to judge this book since romance novels are not really my thing. I like when romance is an element of the story, I’m not usually drawn to stories where romance is the element. Perhaps it’s ignorance, perhaps it’s internalized misogyny that makes me turn my nose up at the sheer mention of the phrase “chick-lit.” Perhaps I can like what I like and dislike what I dislike without having to explain myself, sue me. 

This was my last book of 2022 and it felt like a date with a one minute man.

Short and sweet: Francesca is an Italian woman who is brought to the United States by her husband Richard following World War II. Approaching middle age, she seems content to live quietly as a farmer’s wife in rural Iowa. Until Robert Kincaid comes along, an intrepid, “Brawny” paper towel man-esque, photographer who is shooting Madison County’s famous covered bridges for National Geographic. Francesca helps Robert find one of the bridges on his list, and what follows is pages upon pages of s e x u a l  t e n s i o n. Luckily, Francesca’s husband and two children are out of town for four days which gives Francesca and Robert just enough time to discover they are long lost soulmates, hash it out in Francesca’s marital bed, and then say goodbye. Robert wants Francesca to come with him on his worldly adventures, but Francesca is too devoted to her wet paper towel of a husband and her two children. Years later, Francesca dies and her two children find photos and letters documenting the most romantic four days of their mother’s life and a letter from their mother explaining everything. 

The most perfect story ever made for Hallmark. 

I will give it to Robert James Waller, he was able to conjure up some pretty realistic sexual tension. This was not an enemies-to-lovers book, this was not a friends-to-lovers book. There were just straight up pheromones running this thang. The characters move about each other with such restraint: they are strangers at the start, and one of those strangers is married. The restraint made it kind of interesting, a little game of cat and mouse if the cat and mouse wanted to stick their tongues down each other’s throats. Often with romances I would rather watch them play the game of trying to avoid feelings rather than give into them.

And then the tension was broken by the two consummating the relationship, so that all there is left to examine is the characters as a unit, as a couple. Did their love and their ultimate separation move me? To be honest, no. It is a short novel, coming in at a little less than two hundred pages, and I felt there was not enough time to really develop the characters for me to really care. Robert, I felt, was more nuanced and layered, while Francesca I felt was a little limp. Waller only just scratched the surface of psychological complexity with this one and then he backed into the shadows of “but she was still beautiful, for her age, why doesn’t her husband want to touch her anymore?” Coward.

Also wow, Robert (Robert the author, funny how they’re the same name…), way to give us women exactly what we want out of a book. Beautiful, undersexed housewife meets mysterious, maybe a bit misunderstood, artist and they have a soul bond that you w o u l d n’ t g e t and then they are never in each other’s lives again because sometimes the one we’re meant to be with comes too late. Yes, that is all I, a warm blooded woman with a normal sexual appetite, want. Perhaps I’m just cynical, but I just felt like this pandered a bit. Everything was too dreamy, too wrapped up in a nice little bow, even though the author was trying to pretend that it wasn’t. He was trying to say that life is unfair and things get in the way, but it seems like he doesn’t know the half of how hard it can really get. The whole story still felt too rosy, and I could tell he really wanted to make me cry but my eyes were bone dry, and I’m a crier. This felt like something I would watch for 2 minutes on Lifetime Women and then switch to something with more gripping drama like Family Feud. 

Also, when her children find out, when they read the letter from their mother that basically said “your father was okay, but I had my absolute brains blown out by this drifter and I’ve loved him ever since, k bye,” they’re a little… too chill? If my mother left me that kind of letter, I’d have to take a day off work and lie down. Instead they tear up and think how sad it was that she sacrificed her freedom to live with the man she loved to be with them and oh, how she must have longed. Rewrite: Um I’m sorry, when we were at the State Fair with Dad, you were laying pipe with some random hippie? On our kitchen table??? I think that realization would be met with a little more shock, and maybe disgust, but by that point in the story I was already too checked out to care about how real human beings would behave in a situation like this.

I did not do too much research on this book, and I won’t, but methinks this book is either 

A. Loosely based on the author’s own life, or

B. A vivid fantasy of the author’s in which he is a swarthy vagabond and he’s always had a thing for Italian housewives. 

I’m going to go with B, why in God’s name are you naming the main character after yourself, even if it is slightly autobiographical? Either way, Waller is an absolute madman, even if he does look like a kindly vegetable seller at your local farmer’s market. 

If this book was supposed to be my romance novel gateway drug, the innocuous little volume that eventually leads me to shooting up Emily Henry books in the back alley, then it failed. It is Michael Scott’s bag of Caprese salad. More accurately, it was just forgettable. There were certainly sparks, but those were snuffed out by its own corniness. And corniness that is not self aware is not my kind of corn.