The idea that love compels us to make aspirational selves is a romantic one, but the reciprocal artifice can be tyrannical too. It’s an argument made by Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” and Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies,” two of the most read and talked-about novels from the past few years. Both are about rage and deceit and marriage, and — most crucially — both are split in two, with the husband’s recounting of the relationship paired with the wife’s complicating narrative corrective. In a strange way, the novels contain within themselves their own sequels. The success these books enjoyed has revealed how eager American readers are not only for plot-thick page-turners written in decent prose but ones that argue, in their very structure, for the authority of a female point of view.

A half-century earlier, the author Evan S. Connell, who died in 2013 and is perhaps best remembered for “Son of the Morning Star,” his biography of George Armstrong Custer, published “Mrs. Bridge,” the story of a fictional Kansas City housewife. A decade after that, he published “Mr. Bridge,” the story of her attorney husband. Together, the two novels, which are told in deadpan vignettes, are at once the saddest and funniest books I’ve ever read about marriage.

Mrs. Bridge’s life hews closely, in outline, to the midcentury caricature of a woman we now smugly pity. She plays card games and performs volunteer work and frets over the neatness of her family’s clothing. She picks up but always abandons books; she tries and fails to learn Spanish. Harriet, the maid, takes care of cleaning and cooking. Mr. Bridge, meanwhile, spends long hours at the office and obsesses over the legalese in his own will. From a distance, he appears to be that familiar and suddenly most stylish of villains: a man, basically good, but alive at a time when good meant something different, something we now consider bad.

Mrs. Bridge yearns for her aloof husband to express his love; Mr. Bridge, who has “practically everything he ever wanted,” wishes he could do just that. “He needed to let her know how deeply he felt her presence while they were lying together during the night, as well as each morning when they awoke and in the evening when he came home,” Connell writes. “However, he could think of nothing appropriate.”

But unlike the Rashomon effect at work in “Gone Girl” and “Fates and Furies,” the thrill (and complicated blend of sadness and relief) at play in Connell’s books comes less from the divergent interpretations of shared experience than from the realization that both characters harbor similarly inaccessible emotions. The twist, such as it is, is not that the wife secretly loathes her husband but that the husband secretly loves his wife.