Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox
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Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox
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"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." ― David Foster Wallace
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage―and a society―wrenching itself apart.
First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature ― a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."
Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox - Amazon Sales Rank: #87433 in Books
- Brand: Fox, Paula/ Franzen, Jonathan (INT)
- Published on: 2015-03-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.20" h x .60" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox Amazon.com Review Meet the Bentwoods, Sophie and Otto, "both just over forty," living in Brooklyn sometime in the '60s with neither hope nor children to encourage them to work on their suffocating marriage. Such are the central subjects of Paula Fox's enthralling Desperate Characters, first published to much acclaim in 1970. The novel's action unfolds in a single weekend, and includes Otto's torturous breakup with his longtime business partner, Charlie, and a visit the Bentwoods make to their country home, which they find vandalized. Everything pivots around an occurrence so ordinary as to make us marvel at the power it wields under Fox's brilliant pressure: a cat bite.
Despite Otto's protests, Sophie puts out a dish for a stray that roams the Bentwoods' neighborhood--an area which is also home to enormous poverty, and in which they, in their renovated townhouse, sit like distant royalty. The cat sinks its teeth into her hand and instantly we are plunged into the heart of what plagues every aspect of this couple's lives: the threat of rabies. Where the cat is concerned, it's literal rabies, but the book is also steeped in the sense that a kind of social rabies lurks just outside the Bentwoods' and indeed the whole world's door. As Sophie suddenly realizes at one point: "Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy."
Throughout Fox's gorgeously crafted, unflinching portrait of a dying marriage and a country at war with itself, the Bentwoods fight the desire to self-destruct like everything around them. At one point, Otto screams at Sophie: "What in God's name do you want? Do you want Charlie to murder me? Do you wish the farmhouse had been burned down?... Do you want to be rabid?" She doesn't, of course, but in a certain way, that outcome makes sense. "'God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,' she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she'd discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence." How fortunate and rare to discover such a perfect articulation of the human condition. --Melanie Rehak
Review “Brilliant…[Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” (The New Yorker)“A masterwork of economical prose…Remarkable…[O]ne can only wonder who is more fatally deluded―the desperate characters of the Bentwoods' era or the hyperconfident ones of our own.” (Andrew O'Hehir - Salon)“Absorbing, elegant.” (Charles Winecoff - Entertainment Weekly)“Packed with lucid insights.” (Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly)“A perfect short novel…As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared.” (Andrea Barrett)“This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream.” (Frederick Busch)“The first time I read Desperate Characters…I fell in love with it.” (Jonathan Franzen)
About the Author Paula Fox is the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Most helpful customer reviews
44 of 46 people found the following review helpful. A perfect little novel that finally is getting its due By James W. Curnutt, Jr. I first read Paula Fox's extraordinary novel, "Desperate Characters," in 1971. I was (and am) a voracious reader of fiction. Never had I read anything that was as precise and powerful as this perfect little jewel of a novel. This story of a middle-aged New York couple (Otto and Sophie Bentwood) who,although seemingly self-aware,capable (He is a successful attorney; she is elegant and self-deprecatingly witty, a translator of French literature - today we might stereotype them as yuppies)and 'liberal,'find their image of their lives and their sense of stability fractured by a freak accident and a split with Otto's law partner and longtime friend, is so remarkably alive that, at the age of 16,never having set foot in New York City, I could see their faces, their furniture, their friends, their life. I also got my first true glimpse at how it must look and feel like to begin the process of evaluating a life already half lived, the joys and the regrets.Set in early 1969 (it is spring, and driving through Queens to their summer home on Long Island, Sophie sees an old political poster plastered to a wall:"..the face of an Alabama presidential candidate stared with sooty dead eyes...claiming this territory as his own."), the Bentwoods worry about the possible decline of their Brooklyn neighborhood, and argue about the extraordinary changes in American culture and politics. But their concern, as Ms. Fox, with her restrained,exacting dialogue and painterly descriptions, so vividly illustrates, is with maintaining a cocoon around their lives; what Otto's former law partner, Charlie Russel, refers to, when, early in the novel, he appears at the Bentwood home at 3:00 a.m., and convinces Sophie to go have a drink with him:'"You don't know what's going on," he said at last."You are out of the world, tangled in personal life...People like you ...stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them." He looked calm.He had gotten even.'We see Sophie visiting an old friend in Manhattan, with more fascinating characters, and hear Otto talk about his fears of the new America that was emerging then in more scenes that are so well rendered that I still think of them periodically, as I do many other incidents, lines of dialogue and revelatory insights in this gem of a novel.Both Jonathan Franzen and the late Irving Howe have written wonderful and insightful prefaces to different editions of this novel, which I believe has been in and out of print a number of times over the last 30 plus years. But I know this: I have reread this pleasing and evocative work more times than I can calculate, and while I have copies of both the original edition, and the recent reissue, with Mr. Franzen's introduction, I still lament the loss of of the copy I found, some 15 years ago, with Irving Howe's preface. I believe he predicted this sharp, intelligent novel, not widely noticed the first time around, would live. I am pleased beyond measure to see that it has done just that.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful. American realism at its best. By A Customer You may never have heard of Paula Fox (her novels have never sold well; her children's fiction is for, well, children; but her granddaughter is Courtney Love), but, in a perfect world, you would have, many times over. She is a brilliant prose stylist--one of the surest hands in modern fiction. Desperate Characters is remarkably powerful. Fox's strenth is her ability to fashion absolutely tight plotlines that revolve around ordinary events with diamond-hard, compressed language. Everything is soaked in an existential menace. It's no wonder she has influenced a whole generation of young writers (David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem etc.). Trust me, buy this book!
37 of 43 people found the following review helpful. One of The Finest American Novels of the Twentieth Century By A Customer It is difficult to believe that "Desperate Characters", originally published in 1970, was out of print more than a decade. So much for the erstwhile judgment of the publishing establishment, for this novel is a near perfect work of fiction that can rightfully be considered one of the finest American novels of this century."Desperate Characters" tells the story of Otto and Sophie Bentwood, a childless couple in their 40s ("Sophie was two months older than Otto") living in a fashionably renovated Brooklyn brownstone circa 1970. They have a high income and can purchase "pretty much" whatever they want. Their bookcase holds the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets. They have a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Victorian farmhouse on Long Island. Otto is a lawyer and Sophie a translator. They are, by all outward appearances, living the perfect life. It is the genius of Paula Fox to lay bare the underlying disturbances, the morbid self-consciousness and despair, the ennui, that undermines this seemingly ordered world. "Desperate Characters", a short novel set over a few days, is literary dissection of the highest order, a tightly written masterpiece that leaves the reader uneasy and disturbed.Things begin to unravel early in the story. Sophie, feeding a stray cat, is bitten. Life no longer seems so perfect now, the fear of rabies intruding. When they leave the security of their brownstone, they find "refuse everywhere, a tide that rose but barely ebbed." There were "beer bottles, beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces." The world outside is disorderly, threatening, rabid.Anomie and uncertainty seem now to press everywhere. A rock is thrown through a friend's window during a party. Otto's law firm partnership is breaking up. Sophie drifts off inexplicably with Otto's law partner to walk the streets in the middle of the night. The quiet emotional estrangement of Otto and Sophie becomes apparent from a simple thing like Otto's refusal to answer the telephone "because I never hear anything I want to hear any more". Thus, they stand facing each other "rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom."Sophie no longer has any interest in her work as a translator and can think, instead, only of the unsatisfying affair she had several years earlier. Sitting in their living room, Otto and Sophie's tense, uneasy conversation is interrupted by the doorbell, a black man asking to come into their house and use their phone. "Robbery and murder appeared before [Sophie] in two short scenes, clicked on and off like pictures projected on a screen." The outside world can intrude at any moment. "Life is desperate," as Sophie says. When they seek an escape for a day to their home on Long Island, they find it ransacked and vandalized. And all the time there looms the fear that the cat was rabid. As Sophie, alone, says aloud to herself, "God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside.""Desperate Characters" draws its title from Thoreau's oft-quoted line about the quiet desperation of most men's lives. In a little over 150 pages, Paula Fox has written a near masterpiece of Otto and Sophie Bentwood's fictional lives, of the desperation of their lives, of the desperation of living in a world without certainty and order when certainty and order are all that you live for.
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