Desperate Characters

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

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,

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, wo

Masterfully written but bleak pyschological study of American angst circa 1970, told through three and one half days in the life of a 40ish woman living in a gentrified section of Brooklyn. If any of the various tragedies besetting our bland heroine would rise to some epic level, even that would offer some relief from her oppressive ennui. As it is, each affront is banal and ambiguous, and she and her husband are trapped in a hostile world in which nameless enemies besiege them with pointless acts of small destruction.There is so much in this book to be observed and analyzed that someone will have to pay me or give me some college credit before I make even a tentative attempt. Suffice it to say that the book is bleak and depressing -- and you simply must read it.

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!