Maureen Howard | Thornfield Hall

There you are, on the bus, head in a book, headed home. You even have bedhead. The woman next to you told you this.

Having done her hairdo duty, she asks, “Is your book good?”

Am I Holden Caulfield? Is she Ackley? Do I dare say, “This sentence is terrific”?

Now it’s not always like that. Many passengers are readers, or at least sympathetic to readers. Sometimes they read a library book. Sometimes they read on their phone. I am, at present, reading a Penguin of Maureen Howard’s autobiographical novel, Bridgeport Bus.

But there is much bustling, what with bicyclists struggling to hitch their bike on the rack on the front of the bus (Driver: “I’ve got to get moving, man!”), the homeless guy dragging his garbage bags down the aisle (some of us give up our seats, so we don’t trip over his bags later), men getting hysterical over baseball chat (“Go, team?”), and overhearing noisy conversations about private subjects.

No food and drink are allowed on the bus.. I once had to leave a coffee on the curb. I asked the driver, “Do you want me to litter?” He just raised an eyebrow.

When the reader at large get off the bus, she gallops home, changes into her pajamas, and flops on the couch. And finally she can enjoy the following comic conversation between mother and daughter.

“Tess Mueller is coming over with their nice son who works at the bank.”…

“That’s a shame,” I tell my mother, “because tonight I’m going to the library in New Haven.”

“The library, the library!” – shrieks of coronary outrage.

This witty early novel by Maureen Howard, published in 1965, is one of my favorites. Some, but not all, of her later books are less straightforward, even experimental, so I recommend Bridgeport Bus as a starter book,

The critically-acclaimed Howard doesn’t seem to be well-known anymore, and that’s a shame. Her books are uneven, but her best are stunning. She was a great American writer.

Today, when I told my husband I was finishing up two books this month, he asked, “Is one of them War and Peace?”

I love Tolstoy so much that it is a family joke. But, no, I haven’t been reading it.

I just finished Maureen Howard’s The Rags of Time, a kind of woman’s Ulysses, and the last in Howard’s quartet of novels on the seasons. And there are a few references to War and Peace.

Howard’s double, Mimi, an 80-year-old writer who reflects on American history, personal history, and the design of Central Park, recalls reading War and Peace as a girl one summer in her parents’ bedroom in Bridgeport, Connecticut. ( N.B. This episode is also in Howard’s memoir, Facts of Life.) And near the end of Rags, her husband picks up Mimi’s copy of War and Peace and reads the notes on her rereading .

“She had read to page 733 in War and Peace, marking the confrontation between Napoleon and the Russian emissary as they moved ahead to their bloody war. Girlish!!! in the margin next to the description of the emperor. . . a white waistcoat so long that it covered his round stomach, white doeskin breeches fitting tightly over the fat thighs of his stumpy legs, and Hessian boots. His snuff box, his cologne! Her notes, trailing down the side of the page, remarked upon the brilliant maneuvers of the scene, the slippery give-take of diplomacy, the rough talk of plain take. He presumed she’d read the love story, though this time round, her second chance, notes in the margin revealed how closely she observed the lush setting of the Tsar’s palace, the slippery make-nice that preceded war. Revise, reread, work ahead right up to the end. He must tell her brother, who maintained that when she took up her post with the fat library book each long Summer day, then slept on a cot in his room–that she snored.”

The Rags of Time is a twenty-first century classic, in my view, but it is generally underappreciated (especially at Goodreads). I wonder if women’s experimentations with literary form are still less acceptable than men’s.