Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge (Counterpoint, $15 and $16) by Evan S. Connell. In these two novels, Connell writes in bright, sharp, gorgeously clear short chapters about the lives of bourgeois Midwesterners. The plots are minimal; the books' strengths are the depth of characterization and the ache that is so visible in the restrained language and the main characters' profound though often unexpressed love. Of the two, Mrs. Bridge is the masterwork, but together these books are so affecting that I still think of them almost daily, years after I read them.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (Bantam, $7). I'd argue that Middlemarch is the single greatest English-language book about marriage (a silly thing to argue, I know, as I haven't read every book in the English language). Eliot needs no introduction from me, but in Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke we have a beautiful vision of the way a young person comes into a marriage with starry-eyed idealism, and then grows and is changed and returned to herself by the institution.
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