Alternative title: The Graffiti Of Westchester County
In 1992, I began a novel titled The Last American Cowboy. Basically a rewrite of Shane. Handsome stranger comes to town, protects a homestead and its family against voracious maldoers. https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=8241
Anyway, I’m on about page 100, when I see maybe a People magazine story about this megasuccessful novella The Bridges Of Madison County.
While I was writing about Barker Ajax, long hair, small butt, turns out Robert James Waller was writing about Robert Kincaid. Only Waller wrote a lot faster. I made the mistake of reading BOMC. Handsome stranger, long hair, small butt, comes to town, Hooks up with farmer’s wife, calls himself ‘the last cowboy.’
Twenty-seven years later, I am still on page 100. And I am listening to BMOC as the puppy and I walk. Took just three days. We take long walks and the book is only 192 pages. Narrating the audiobook is the author himself, who sounds like one of those podcasts intended to help you sleep. Hypnotic and dreamy. Think he thinks he sounds sexy.
Fifty Shades Of Iowa. His shirt sticks to his muscular torso while her nipples show through her t-shirt and they haven’t even shaken hands yet.
Francesca: I had thoughts about him I hardly knew what to do with, and he read every one. Whatever I wanted, he gave himself up to, and in that moment everything I knew to be true about myself was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.
The damn book is formulaic and that’s the best part. But if you are a writer and hope to be successful, RJW & BOMC deserve serious study.
So I went to Wikipedia, [EMPHASIS mine. – ed.]
WITHOUT EXPECTING TO, Robert James Waller conceived of The Bridges of Madison County in the early 1990s. On leave from his teaching job at the University of Northern Iowa, Waller was photographing the Mississippi River with a friend when he decided to photograph Madison County, Iowa’s, covered bridges. This event, alongside a song Waller wrote years earlier about “the dreams of a woman named Francesca,” gave him the idea for the novella, WHICH WAS COMPLETED IN ELEVEN (11) DAYS.
The novel is one of the bestselling books of the 20th century, with 60 MILLION copies sold worldwide. It has also been adapted into a feature film in 1995 and a musical in 2013.
60,000,000. That’s a successful writer. One type, at least.
The leopard swept over her, again and again and yet again, like a long prairie wind, and rolling beneath him, she rode on that wind like some temple virgin towards the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the novella’s “compelling” story for “elevating to a spiritual level the common fantasy in which a virile stranger materializes in the kitchen of a quiet housewife and takes her into his arms.” The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in August 1992 and slowly climbed to number 1, and remained on the list for over three years (164 consecutive weeks), through October 8, 1995.
In a book review for the Independent titled “Cowbore Of Yesteryear,” Nicolette Jones wrote
The story, which poses as the truth with a how-I-came-across-these-documents introduction, is this: rugged 52-year-old photographer/poet and free spirit Robert Kincaid has a four-day love affair with Francesca Johnson, an unfulfilled Iowan farmer’s wife whom he meets by chance; though they never see each other again, this passion obsesses both of them for the rest of their lives. Kincaid is a combination of old-fashioned machismo and New Man soulfulness – in him frontier legends meet Iron John; a prevalent myth of muscular, self-sufficient manliness combined with fashionable cod psychology.
In the middle of sex, Kincaid whispers to the awed Francesca: ‘I am the highway and the peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.’ He describes himself as ‘one of the last cowboys’, in a pseudy exposition of ideas that convince Francesca – and has also persuaded several previous lovers – that he has ‘an intelligence that (is) brilliant in a raw, primitive, almost mystical fashion’, but which convinces any sensible reader that he is an overblown bore. He has, we learn, tight chest muscles, a ‘small rear’, a belly ‘as flat as a knife blade’ and the animal grace of a leopard. He’s cute, too. We are told five times that he calls his pick-up truck Harry.
Meanwhile, Italian-born Francesca, though 45, has breasts that are ‘nice and firm’. A former schoolteacher, she should know better than to fall for Kincaid’s hogwash. We are constantly assured of the power of the love these two have for each other, but from a different cultural perspective it is hard to believe in, or to like, either of them.
In a review appearing in the Los Angeles Times, free-lance writer Pauli Carnes (1993) makes the case that BOMC is “pornography for yuppie women.” Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis (1993) condemns the book as “an insipid, fatuous, mealy-mouthed third-rate soap opera with a semi-fascist point of view.”
And Frank Rich, drama critic for the New York Times, echoing concerns about the theme of an empty, ill- defined woman waiting around for a godlike man to supply her life with meaning and purpose, sees BOMC as a “backlash book, celebrating narcisssistic hit-and-run flings for men and pointless marital misery for women.”
Sixty million copies. 60,000,000.
Robert: It’s clear to me now that I have been moving towards you and you towards me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving towards one another.
It is clear to me now the success of a writer like Waller does not find its spark in great composition nor enlightening philosophy.
Like The Bridges of Madison County, success is a fairy tale.
And all you have to do is write it.
Decided to change the title of my book. And now instead of a cowboy on a marijuana farm in the Coast Range, on page 101, Barker Ajax is now a mystical street artist – you know, like Banksy – and he meets this smoking-hot nun who teaches finger painting to disadvantaged children in White Plains. Sister Mary Luz contemplates leaving the Church after one night together with Barker.
She – of course, she didn’t – never knew it could be like this.
And Barker is not a leopard, more a wild dog.
With soulful, mesmerizing eyes.
And a small butt.