The Bridge Across Forever

by Richard Bach

I picked this book up from a secondhand store in Seattle many years ago, and was pretty dubious about it. In the first place, I'm not much into romances or love stories. In the second, the out of body experiences, astral projections and dreams in which the author visits the future seemed a little far-fetched to me. I questioned whether those things really happened the way he stated. This book was written as a nonfictional account, but now some people have been finding it in the fiction section of bookstores.

That said, I really did enjoy reading The Bridge Across Forever. I found it an engrossing story, partly because it described a life so different from mine: a writer finds himself a sudden success, and goes through a bunch of ups and downs as he alternately spends his money on airplanes and looses it again. The descriptions of what it feels like to fly an airplane enthralled me. But the heart of the story is about a man seeking a perfect relationship. The problem is that he isn't perfect, and the woman he finally finds is portrayed as being so. He comes across as rather immature, self-centered and rude, whereas his soul-mate is full of phrases of wisdom and philosophical advice on life and love. The dialog between them is very frank and realistic, and made me laugh quite a number of times.

The sad thing is that recently I discovered that Bach left the soul-mate he wrote about in this book, after being married for twenty years, and returned to being the womanizer he was before he met her. Apparently he had left a wife and six kids before he ever met her, too! Children are never mentioned in the book at all, not as part of his past or plans for his future. It was quite disappointing to realize that he never followed all the beautiful-sounding advice he made in his book.

Rating: 3/5           Published 1984, 316 pgs