At A Woman's Place bookstore, owner Sally Smith finally decided to put it to a vote.
"We are sister against sister over whether this is one of the greatest love stories ever written or a pathetic fictionalization of a dysfunctional relationship. Cast your vote . . . ," reads the little sign over the ballot box set up on the sales counter.At the heart of the debate raging among the bookstore's customers, and in fact among readers across the country, is a slim little book called "The Bridges of Madison County."
The book, by Robert James Waller, is currently No. 1 on the "New York Times" bestseller list. It is so popular that local booksellers are sold out and are having trouble getting copies from their distributors.
The people who love the book love it so much they have been known to buy 17 copies for their friends. One bookstore manager in Florida loved the book so much he even offered the book to his customers at cost. And the people who hate this book hate it almost as passionately.
"Thank you for providing us with this delicious outlet for our literary rage," wrote Utah author Terry Tempest Williams, only slightly tongue in cheek, on her ballot at A Woman's Place.
Some of the debate is simply about style. Critics find the writing flowery, the plot stale and the characters superficial. (Sample passage: "I am the highway and the peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.")
But the book has also stirred up something more telling than simply how people react to the telling of this tale. The debate over "The Bridges of Madison County" is really about what we're talking about when we talk about love.
In book reviews and on morning talk shows, the book is being compared to that other critically assailed and publicly beloved love story, "Love Story." Like "The Bridges of Madison County," Erich Segal's 1970 best seller was simple and tragic. Like its predecessor, "The Bridges of Madison County" is the kind of book that makes people insult each other when they don't see eye to eye on its merits.
"Love Story," the tale of young love torn asunder by death, gave the world a new cliche: Love means not ever having to say you're sorry. "The Bridges of Madison County" hasn't spawned any official cliches yet, but here's a possibility: Love means never having to be sorry you stayed together.
Here's the basic plot: Robert Kincaid, a ruggedly handsome, middle-aged photographer for National Geographic, swoops into a sleepy Iowa farm town one August day in 1965 and meets, by chance, Francesca Johnson, a beautiful middle-aged farm wife. They fall in love at first sight.
They then spend four passionate days together (her husband and children are at the State Fair showing off their prize pigs), but in the end she decides it would be more noble not to run off with her lover. For the next 22 years (17 for the photographer because he dies first) they pine for each other, knowing their love was . . . well, let Robert Kincaid describe it: "We're in love. As deeply, as profoundly, as it's possible to be in love."
Or as the book jacket sums it up: "What occurs by the old bridges of Madison County becomes a prism transforming the ordinary emotions we think we understand into something rare and brilliant."
Not even! say the book's critics, who feel that it is only a cut (maybe only a nick) above every bad romance novel ever written. Yet people who would not be caught dead reading a Harlequin romance are eager to read and praise "The Bridges of Madison County."
And the truth is, it's a hard book not to love at first sight. It's smaller than a regular hardback, and the cover is pastel and feels so soft you want to caress it. As soon as you look at this book, and definitely by the time you've held it in your hands, you feel you're in for an intimate experience.
Even beyond the packaging, the book is hard for most readers to put down.
The lure of "The Bridges of Madison County," even for those who end up ultimately hating it, is the love story itself.
It may be that most of us just want a good romance novel, as long as it's disguised as something else. Maybe what most of us want is a good romance. We long for passion and tenderness and an instant, almost nonverbal connection with another person. We long for romance unsullied by the kinds of ironies and subtleties and angst that the best of the modern authors would bring to it.
We long, as "The Bridges of Madison County" fan Ellen Richardson says, "to have someone carry us in their hearts so passionately." We long for romance that endures, even - or especially - if it endures because the people never see each other again. We long, in short, for longing.
"Half of you thinks: `Everybody in their lives should have something like this happen to them,' " says Richard Bray, owner of Ex Libris, a bookstore in Sun Valley, Idaho. "And the other half of you says, `Yes, but not to my wife.' "
Mary Dickson loved "The Bridges of Madison County." While in real life and in most books people often don't stay in love, what impressed Dickson about "The Bridges of Madison County" was that the love endured.
It doesn't bother Dickson that the characters didn't really know each other that well, or that the love possibly endured because they never had to figure out who was driving the kids to soccer. The reality is that when lovers stay together the love often diminishes, says Dickson. "You can't have breakfast with someone every day and have them still be a mystery." It's the mystery that helps fuel the romance.
That's one of the things that bothers Salt Lake therapist Michael (Misha) Zbar about this book.
Pining for a love you've lost, or thinking you can only have romance with someone you don't really know, as opposed to actually spending the rest of your life living with, understanding and loving that person, is a copout, says Zbar. There are no risks involved and no hard work.
"The author toots it as this really deep, abiding love," says Zbar about the book. "But to me all he's portrayed here is the initial falling in love."
What's so intoxicating about falling in love, and therefore about the book, is that when you're falling in love you feel awake and alive, says Zbar, and after you've been in a relationship for a while it seems to lose that magic.
"What he's saying is that the only answer is to have an affair. He's saying that the only way to find that magic again is to find a new person."
Zbar, who teaches classes about what she calls "conscious loving," believes that couples can hold onto the magic by deliberately trying to understand their partners and by helping their partners understand them. Zbar believes that relationships only work when we tell each other what we need, listen to what our partners say they need, and focus on acting in loving ways.
"The Bridges of Madison County," says Zbar, "just feeds into the Madison Avenue thing that all it takes is running down a beach, that love `just happens.' The mistake (the characters and the author) made is attributing those feelings of magic to another person instead of to themselves," adds Zbar. "We can create that kind of passion in our own lives," she says.
According to A Woman's Place owner Smith, men often love this book. "They feel they've had a sensitive experience," laughs Smith. "The Little, Brown sales rep told me that the book appeals to men because of the independence of the male character. He's a fantasy character for men who wonder what it would have been like to live life on their own terms."
The book's author, who dresses and looks suspiciously like his main character, glorifies Kincaid as "the last cowboy," a man who can't seem to settle down long enough to even own a dog.
Even if you've found the book compelling, it's easy to decide, when it's all over, that maybe Waller is extolling something other than a lifelong devotion to loving one woman. Maybe, you might decide, he's really glorifying the easy way out.
But, for all its faults, "The Bridges of Madison County" has done what most books fail to do - it has stirred up emotions and a national debate.
"I used to say it should be against the law to read this book," says Roz Willey, who leads discussion groups at A Woman's Place and who hated the book.
But Willey enjoys the passion the book has generated, pro and con. "Now I think: Everyone should read it."