FICTION

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY by Robert James Waller (Warner: $14.95; 171 pp.). At 52, Robert Kincaid is a National Geographic photographer, a nomadic loner who calls himself “one of the last cowboys.” At 45, Francesca Johnson is a former Italian war bride who lives all too rooted a life on an Iowa farm. They meet in the summer of 1965, when Robert is taking pictures of the covered bridges in the area and Francesca’s husband and children are off at the state fair.

They fall in love. They enjoy four days of passion so incandescent that it seems to confirm a cosmic destiny and to short-circuit conventional logic. Then they part, but the glow never fades.

In a long foreword, author Robert James Waller asserts that these were real people--that this story is backed by documents that Francesca’s children discovered after her death. In an afterword, he interviews a jazz musician in Washington State who knew Robert Kincaid in later years and attests to his emotional fidelity. A scaffolding of hard, journalistic detail surrounds the romantic scenes, in which Waller doesn’t hesitate to use the novelist’s privilege of entering his characters’ minds--or to write, at times, like a Harlequineer.

Waller misjudges the problem here. Readers--romantic readers, at any rate--are willing to believe in the love story. The journalism isn’t needed to prop it up. The problem is that the story lacks conflict, other than the guilt that keeps Francesca from leaving her family. Nothing ever threatens the couple’s conviction that their affair is something mystical, beyond the common range of experience. And without such a threat, the story is like a Coke that’s been opened a while ago: sweet but flat.