The metaphor of the bridge

“What’s going on here?” Ray asked.

Orville hunched his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “ I guess I ran out of self-control.”

Cathie Pelletier, The One-Way Bridge

Running out of self-control is something that plagues several of Cathie Pelletier’s characters in The One-Way Bridge. Yet a one-way bridge, her novel’s main metaphor, is something that needs self-control to work. Whoever gets there first has right of way. Anyone coming from the opposite direction must wait his turn. A one-way bridge, like a four-way stop or society in general, requires a measure of patience and respect for others.

There were three such one-way bridges in Pelletier’s hometown of Allagash in northern Maine when she was growing up. (Now she has returned and lives in the same house where she was born.) And so it was easy for her to imagine a one-way bridge in her fictional town of Mattagash in northern Maine. A map at the front of the novel’s helps readers visualize the town, the bridge at its center and the homes and businesses of her various characters.

These characters include Orville, the Mattagash mail carrier in his last week of work who now regrets his decision to retire; Edna, mother of identical twin boys who, fantasizing about a man she conversed with when he passed through town, tells her husband she wants a divorce; Harry, who still recovering from the shocks of a rough experience in Vietnam and the death of his wife, gets a different kind of shock when the woman who runs the local eatery makes it plain she desires him; and Billy Thunder, impatient for Orville to deliver his latest shipment of illicit drugs so he can sell them and pay off a couple of hapless hoods, as well as an ex-girlfriend he stole from.

All this sounds like serious business, and it is, but Pelletier mixes in so much humor that it seems like a comic novel, a suggestion buttressed by the cover illustration, which the author said she hated when I saw her in St. Petersburg in January. I love the cover and think it's perfect for the book.

A bridge is something that joins, not just two sides of a town separated by a river but also people separated by whatever. Pelletier’s one-way bridge, instead of just being the source of a crisis when two vehicles enter it at the same time, becomes the catalyst for the solution to just about everyone’s conflict, or loss of self-control.

This novel won't suit everyone. Some will find it too pat, too light or too unrealistic. I, however, found it wonderful.