Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal

All kinds of people set out in the violet night and converged in the city whose soda pop name jangled like thousands of corrosive little pins in their dry mouths. The wanted ads that popped up on the web called for cable riggers, ironworkers, welders, concrete form setters, asphalt paving crews, crane operators, scaffolding builders, heavy-lifting contractors, excavators--these skilled workers packed their bags in a single movement, synchronised, a tight manoeuvre, and set off by any means they could. A first wave stuffed themselves into cargo planes chartered by subcontractors who specialised in recruiting skilled laborers--these companies worked fast and with cliched racism: preferring the strong Turk, the industrious Korean, the aesthetic Tunisian, the Finnish carpenter, the Austrian cabinetmaker, and the Kenyan geometrician; avoiding the dancing Greek and the stormy Spaniard, the Japanese hypocrite and the impulsive Slav. The chosen ones, poor terrified guys dealing with their baptism by air, barfed up their guts at the back of the cabin.

An ambitious politician, recently elected the mayor of the city of Coca in Southern California, decides that his legacy will be to build an immense bridge that crosses the city's wide river. The project brings together thousands upon thousands of people, from architects and engineers to day laborers: an immense undertaking that, as much as the mayor wishes it were otherwise, cannot be credited to anyone person. In a way, Maylis de Kerangal's Birth of a Bridge, which tells the story of the bridge's rise from conception to completion, suggests a novel like William Goldman's The Spire, about the foolhardy construction of a giant spire in a medieval cathedral. Such grand projects emerge only from a kind of hubris, a belief--perhaps justified--that we can create things more lasting than bronze.

I really liked De Kerangal's novel Painting Time; I felt that her unique style--long sentences stacked with clipped phrases, separated only by speedy commas--reflected the meticulous nature of the decorative painter at its center. Birth of a Bridge is similar to Painting Time in that it takes as its subject an effort requiring great meticulousness from people whose efforts are not usually heralded: the concrete scientists, the laborers moving enormous girders, the divers and excavators who dig trenches beneath the river for the bridge's great pylons. By contrast, I was surprised by the novel's moments of grand, almost comic violence. The project engineer, stabbed by an anthropologist who's rowed for days down the river in protest of the threat the bridge poses to traditional native communities in the jungle. The laborer fleeing a life in Anchorage, where he murdered his girlfriend by drawing a bear into their apartment. The same laborer, being blackmailed by Coca's underground into blowing up the bridge.

Sometimes these moments worked, sometimes they didn't. My principal feeling about Birth of a Bridge is something that I've been feeling a lot of lately: that the focus on so many characters at the expense of a single, strong point of view keeps it from being truly engaging. The closest we have to a central character in Birth of a Bridge is Georges Diderot, the no-nonsense project engineer tasked with bringing the bridge to completion. It is Diderot, rather than the ambitious mayor, who comes closest to being the father of the bridge, the one person without whom it would not rise.

In the end, unlike in The Spire, the bridge does rise, and the world is forever changed. Change will come to the native communities in the forest, whether the anthropologist likes it or not, and change comes to the lives of Diderot and the thousands of others who take part in the "birth of the bridge."