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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 enthrallingDesperate 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
Destined to tickle your intellectual senses With exceptional imagery, similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Paper", or Cynthia Ozick's "The Pagan Rabbi", Paula Fox weaves a powerful drama, this one in search of questions as to the values of the modern family, the struggle for personal identity.
At the center of the book we find a middle-aged woman who, in an act of kindness, suffers a wound inflicted by a street cat. Over the course of several days, she questions not only the need for treatment, but also her marriage, her devotion to her husband and the outcome of her personal choices.
The book, although short, is packed with exceptional observations and requires numerous readings and analysis. The author masterfully paints the ever transitioning complexities of modern society, the transformation of values (both within the family, as well as within society as a whole), the degradation of dreams, friendships, the faith in the modern and the faith in one's self.
I encourage your to tickle your intellectual senses and devote a good portion of your free time to understanding the message of "Desperate Characters".
- by Simon Cleveland
OK, but nothing to be overly excited about As much as Jonathan Franzen and the New Yorker seem to be wowed by this book, I can't help but think it falls under the same category as "The Good Soldier," a book that is well-written, but is taken to another level of acclaim, solely because critics and academics see so much going on in the story. I'm sorry, but this novel fails in the way that Franzen's own book "The Corrections" succeeds. The fine line between portraying the small happenings of life in a way that perpetuates something greater and simply portraying those small happenings is very difficult to navigate and unfortunately, Fox fails. But if you want to be a writer heralded by the New Yorker and other such literary people, then do read this and gain insight into a certain genre of literature that has been declining in recent years.Paula Fox is no Richard Yates The amount of crtiical attention that Paula Fox has recently recieved piqued my curiostiy, to say the least. So, I ordered a copy of DESPERATE CHARACTERS from AMAZON, and I was only too optimistic about the prospect of finding yet another great writer whose work has been under-appreciated. I am a big admirer of Richard Yates, albeit a recent one, (Yates is also a writer's writer) and couldn't help but notice that, at least at first glance, there seemed to be some profound similarities between the writing careers of Paula Fox and Richard Yates.
They deal with simialar themes and have similar publishing histories. I was also impressed by Jonathon Franzen's zeal in praising Paula Fox, even to the point of calling her "obviously superior" to Updike, Bellow and Roth. WOW ! I thought, if what Franzen says is even partly true, then discovering Paula Fox will be among the happiest occasions of the year for me.
Unfortunately, Franzen and other Fox devotees are wrong. The writing is labored and feels that way. It is amatuerish at best. What you have here is an interesting thinker and potentially talented writer who never really matured in her craft. Great writing is by definition NOT boring. And Paula Fox is boring. DESPERATE CHARCTERS lacks compassion for its characters and any kind of insight into their psychological motivations. We are supposed to accept on faith that these people just [are not good]. The book is intellectually shallow, and the writing is flat.
Spend your money elsewhere. Or don't, and don't say I didn't warn you.
