The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

I started reading Wilder’s novels in high school—The Bridge and The Ides of March. The others came later, as did my appreciation of those two familiar novels. This parallels the fate of Our Town: you first encounter it when you are old enough to be touched by it but still too young to understand its depths. And later you realize it is not the sentimental chestnut you’d remembered, but a dark, wrenching, overpowering work about human memory and loss. So too with these first five novels of his. Encountering them again, having oneself acquired the scars on the heart Wilder had set out to reveal, you feel you are at last reading them for the first time, in all their true freshness and wonder and gravity. I sit stunned, time and again, by their shimmer and tensile strength, their miraculous access to the soul’s secrets.