Post-‘Bridges’ Novels Rub Out The Interloper

Call it Francesca’s revenge.

The Robert Kincaid wanna-be’s - those untamed men, those heartbreakers of frustrated housewives - in post-Madison County literature are dying.

Young.

Tragically.

Suicidally?

The love triangle is getting more puzzling.

Take what has been billed as the new “Bridges”: “The Horse Whisperer” by Nicholas Evans (Delacorte Press, 1995).

It’s the No. 1 book on the best-seller list. The story was optioned for $3 million by Joe Roth at Walt Disney Pictures before the book even was finished.

“The Horse Whisperer” picks at the same scab as “Bridges.”

Is it honorable or stupid to stay in a marriage with a stable and good - albeit ordinary and somewhat stodgy - partner, rather than follow the call of wild love with an unlikely rogue?

Here’s a clue. The new adulterous housewife heroine doesn’t die crying at the kitchen table.

She’s Annie Graves, New York magazine editor and wife of Robert Graves, whose only crime against passion seems to be an overdose of just plain niceness and stability.

Annie falls hard for Tom Booker, a cowboy of sorts, a horse whisperer with a work-toughened muscular body shaded by a cowboy hat.

They share a few days of conjugal bliss, and then Annie tells Tom she wants to leave her husband for him. Good ol’ Tom says no way, that wouldn’t be right, and then he goes out and gets in the way of a fuming stallion and dies of trampling. “Tom neither dodged nor ducked nor even flinched and, once more, stepped in closer.”

Couldn’t live without his Annie, huh? Loyal to the end, huh?

Annie lives happily ever after with a new baby, maybe Robert’s, maybe Tom’s. Although she has become estranged from Robert, the last page promises she might be able to persuade him to stay the whole weekend, and there’s optimism that the marriage will be patched up.

How clever of author Nicholas Evans to let the woman have her wild man and her husband, too. How satisfying to think an honorable man would commit suicide rather than live without the only true love he’s ever known.

Anne Rivers Siddons, an oft-seen author on the best-seller list, hits the same theme with her newest book.

“Faultlines” (HarperCollins, 1995) brings us Merritt Fowler, a too-good Southern housewife, and details her brief liaison with T.C. Bridgewater (purely a coincidence, we’re sure, that Bridge thing) a “bearded maverick earthquake scientist.”

When the time comes for Merritt to leave, she also tells T.C. she couldn’t possibly return to Pom, her doctor husband, whose major shortcoming is zealous dedication to helping the poor. But T.C. insists. Then he climbs back into his wobbly fire tower, and it tumbles in a huge earthquake and crushes him - dead.

Merritt rushes back to Pom’s arms.

Different book. Same message.

Doctors, lawyers and other conventional, seemingly loyal husbands are out.

Rogue fellows, preferably those who wear denim and commune with the earth and the animals, are in.

The stodgy types are forgiving.

The maverick dudes die hard when the woman they love must leave.

Women’s neediness must be at an all-time high if they keep sucking up this kind of fantasy, and surely Mike Doonesbury isn’t the only male who wants to strike out at this kind of fairy tale.

Seems there’s a trend here. The only love stories capable of putting a tough squeeze on our emotions (and pulling in the big bucks from publishers and movie producers) are stories of adultery, usually initiated by a woman in need of real love.

Read them, watch them, cry over them if you must. But then grow up.

Real love is about sticking to commitments.