The Bridges of Madison County is slight enough as a novel and compressed enough in plot that there is very little overt social commentary in it. Robert Kincaid represents a dying breed of quintessential male — he describes himself as the "last cowboy" — who resists socialization into the norms of the modern world. He is a wanderer, a lone seeker after "truth" and meaning in life which he discourses on in many mystical and filmy soliloquies, discourses which, incidentally, provoked much of the novel's negative criticism.

Kincaid represents a contemporary version of the unsettled frontiersman who has figured in American literature since the appearance of James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo in the Leatherstocking tales of the early nineteenth century. Now provided with a global frontier Kincaid drifts from assignment to assignment, exploring exotic locales in search of himself and some sort of serenity. It is...