[In the following review, Perrin offers a positive assessment of Bridgeport Bus, praising Howard's treatment of the theme of personal transformation.]

Mary Agnes Keeley, 35 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall, thin as a pencil, lives with her widowed mother in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her father, a Bridgeport fireman, died when she was 15. Right after high school she went to work to help put her brother through Fordham. He is now an FBI agent, assigned to the Buffalo, New York, office, with a wife and three children. Mary Agnes is secretary to the president of Standard Zipper in Bridgeport. She is a virgin. She is also on the edge of martyrdom to her mother, a natural genius at using guilt feelings and ill health to control her children.

That martyrdom does not occur. Instead this novel does. Mary Agnes takes the Bridgeport bus. That is, she quits her job, leaves home, and goes to New York. Mary Agnes—only let's call her Ag, as most people do—has always been bright. Her one defiance of her mother over the years has been the taking of a whole series of night courses in literature. She reads voraciously, has ambitions to write.

In fairly short order she is writing: not glamorously, to be sure, only advertising copy for a manufacturer of Velcro fasteners. But she's living in an apartment on Ninth Street, meeting artists, putting on weight. By Chapter 5 she has both lost her virginity and begun to write fiction.

This basic plot is a familiar one, because it expresses one of the very commonest of human fantasies. Ugly duckling becomes a swan. Man or woman trapped in a boring routine breaks loose, makes a new start, achieves the glamorous life. Seemingly ordinary person proves exceptional. All of us are exceptional, at least to ourselves, only the world fails to treat us so. It is deeply gratifying to read about someone who gets a grip on himself or herself, and makes the world respond properly.

Maureen Howard's treatment of this theme is something else. In the usual book of this kind—and I am talking about genuine novels, not easy romances—the Ag character has center stage all to herself, while we, entranced, watch her transformation. And in the usual book of this kind, swanhood turns out to be a really nice thing. Some of the other swans may prove vicious; some of the glitter of the great world may prove to be tinsel; the transformed life may even end in tragedy. But that it is a glorious thing to become a swan, and that the great world is truly great, these assumptions are not questioned.

Bridgeport Bus is not like that. It has three heroines. Ag is certainly the main one—and most of the time the narrator—but there are two other young women whose stories are told and whose presence makes the value of swanhood much more dubious.

One is Lydia Savaard. Ag meets her when she first arrives in New York, and stays briefly at a hotel for women, a genteel place on Fifth Avenue. Lydia is 25, rather mousy, as WASPly Protestant as Ag is Irish Catholic. She grew up in a nice upper-middle-class family in Cleveland, went to Vassar, and then married a young aristocrat just out of Princeton. The Savaards, though they have now lost most of their money, have been high society for two centuries. What Lydia didn't realize, marrying Henry Savaard, was that his upper-classness is a burden he can't handle. He simply can't live up to his concept of what a Savaard should be. He married Lydia principally because he thought Miss Mouse wouldn't see through him, and would join him in worship of the Savaard past. But he sees through himself, and the knowledge breaks him. At 26 he is in a mental institution, which is why Lydia is at the women's hotel. She's trying with the aid of pills to sleep 20 hours a day, and in the other four making feeble attempts to get an annulment. (Her lawyer is one of the many superbly drawn minor characters.) Ag partially rouses poor Lydia from this lethargy, and the two of them take the little apartment on Ninth Street together. It is hard to envy the aristocratic WASP life once you've got to know Lydia and Henry.

The third heroine is Ag's first cousin, Sherry Henderson. Sherry, born Mary Elizabeth Hurley, grew up in Bridgeport even more drably than Ag herself. But she was red-headed, very pretty, irresistibly attractive to men. She took the Bridgeport bus long before Ag. She left at 16. First she became a chorus girl, later a budding starlet. Alas, she didn't have quite enough talent or quite enough sense. There is no blossom-time. Though she stays in the world of luxury and privilege—she eventually marries a wealthy older man—she is as unable as Henry Savaard to sustain the role of swan. Sherry is a suicide at 33.

And Ag herself? Ag is a survivor. At the end of the book Ag is about to have a baby. Ag has become a very good writer. One of the marvelous things in Bridgeport Bus is the interpolated play that occupies about a quarter of the book. Ag wrote it. She herself is one of the main characters; the other seven are her parents, her brother, the two Savaards, Sherry, and Stanley Sarnicki, her principal lover in New York. The play is tragic, symbolic, surrealistic—and wildly funny. It is a tremendous tour de force. If only it could stand alone (it can't), I would love to see it on Broadway.

But Ag, tough, perceptive and witty as she is, suffers from the same malady that Sherry and Lydia and Henry do. It is a malady I know well myself. It is the incapacity to forgive life for being so mundane. My first fully conscious experience of it occurred when I was a young man, in love with a slightly older woman, a divorcée with a small daughter. The three of us were in a supermarket on a Friday night, buying food for the weekend.

The store was packed with other shoppers, mostly harassed. Martha, the little daughter, was crying. I longed to be gone. But Lois, the mother, kept thinking of more grubby things we needed: paper towels, detergent, Wesson oil. In the end it all seemed so unutterably beneath what I wanted life to be like that I began drifting further and further back from the shopping cart (a squalid enough object itself). I didn't want to be associated. Lois, a clever woman, divined at once what was in my mind, and we later had a sharp scene about it.

Ag—and, of course, Maureen Howard behind her—sees almost everywhere that failure of life to be what it should be. If you escape the shopping carts, as on the Savaard estate on Long Island, then you merely have a high-class setting in which the actors mostly fail to sustain their parts. It is the special brilliance of Bridgeport Bus that it turns this rueful awareness into gallant and high comedy.