Desperate Characters: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Characters Studied
Review: A very fast and furious read -- and entertaining, despite the rather grim tone. The story concerns an upper middle class Brooklyn couple, Otto and Sophie Bentwood. At the start, Sophie is bitten by a stray cat she was feeding (against Otto's advice). The action, such as it is, plays out over a couple of days, as their relationship soars and stumbles and careens through assorted domestic trifles and squabbles and little tests -- and as Sophie tries to decide whether she should have that swollen bite looked at. The backdrop is late 60s America, which seems to be coming apart at the seams. Fox's eye is incredible, her wit is deadly, and the tension keeps you turning the pages. It it weren't so nerve-wracking, I'd call it fun. The Norton paperback edition has a very insightful introduction by Jonathan Franzen, but don't read until AFTER you've finished the book.

Rating:
Summary: Suspense, atmosphere, clarity and power
Review: Although a short work, this novel grips the reader from the beginning because of the powerful characterisation and the Chekhovian clarity of expression and honesty of description. Class differences, racism, envy, pride, jealousy, and most of all, a free floating anxiety pervades the rich atmosphere. The final image of black ink dripping down a wall immediately following an embrace by the two main characters who realise they have each other and not much besides to combat a hostile world, is strangely vivid and memorable. The city is animal like, and the innocent lonely and hungry cat attains an almost Poe like horribleness by the end of the story. Brilliant stuff and an absorbing read.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Finest American Novels of the Last Century
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Desperate Characters
Review: It must be a "New York" thing to judge this book as being 'brilliant.' While many facets of Paula Fox's writing (even within this book) could be construed as 'great,' I felt Desperate Characters was just that...desperate for character(s). I can't recall reading about characters as flat as the Bentwoods. Even the foils seemed more dynamic. As metaphorically important as the 'cat bite/rabies' plotline was to Fox's overall message, it was as disinteresting to me as reading about someone else's nail fungus. I realize it's fiction, but come on - for a stuffy, pretentious woman living in the late '60s Brooklyn not to have enough sense to immediately get a tetanus shot? That's really reaching for something to weave a story around. The dialogue was realistic in certain moments, but drifted in and out of sounding like over-rehearsed diatribes written for the stage, then back to normal conversational offerings (thankfully). Again, maybe that, too, is a New York thing. It was unusually difficult to keep track of who was involved in the dialogues (like I've never experienced before). This seemed to take away from my reading flow and made this book too long of a read for such a short novella. I found the scenes and characters described incredibly well, as Fox is quite masterful at showing us what she wants us to see, but that's where my positive remarks about this book stop. Perhaps a second read-through might change my mind - I just don't want to pick it up again any time soon.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent novel
Review: Sophie and Otto live quite securely; they have money, position, a renovated brownstone, and a Mercedes. Unfortunately the world around them is not behaving in a civilized manner. A cat bites Sophie; a neighbor relieves himself out of his bedroom window; drunks vomit on the sidewalk. Otto and his law partner break up, and their Long Island farmhouse is vandalized. At one point Otto laments "I wish someone could tell me how I can live."

These are people viewed at a distance. They are cardboard characters, not because of any ineptness on behalf of the author, but because they truly are made of cardboard. There is no "there" there when we search for the inner beings of Sophie and Otto. One can categorize this novel as a story of a failing marriage, but I don't think that's the case. What we are viewing is a stagnant marriage, but stagnation seems normal for this couple; it is a life for which they are especially suited. Sophie makes sporadic, impulsive attempts to loosen her bondage to this existence: she has an affair; in a sudden rage she calls a friend a "dumb old collapsed bag"; she goes out for drinks with Otto's former partner at 3AM. Yet throughout the book we feel no sympathy for anyone who makes an appearance. Well almost anyone. The guy who empties his bladder out of his bedroom window does seem to be an independent cuss. Maybe we should get to know him better.

Oh, and the word pictures, the metaphors, the similes: "her glance rested on Leon and Sophie with remote interest, like someone who does not particularly like fish, but finds herself imprisoned in an aquarium." This is one of many 1970's novels that portray the vacuous nature of the new, spiritually dead, materialistic society (see Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, for example). It's an amazing book. Now I'm off to buy her other novels.

Rating:
Summary: Paula Fox is no Richard Yates
Review: Sophie Bentwood, a charming urban woman is feeling trapped by her demeaning lawyer husband. Her hand is bleeding from a cat bite, and her neighborhood is becoming increasingly slummy and decrepit. But no matter, the bread is fresh from the bakery, the flowers arranged on the table, and she seems content to go through her life in a blank trance through which reality can only make brief, startling appearances.

Sound familiar? If it does, then you're probably acquainted with the sort of fiction that was well-nigh done to death in the New Yorker in the seventies and eighties, the kind of tale that Ann Beattie has made her hallmark: an upper middle class family trying to muffle its own despair and ennui with yet another sconce, throw pillow, or tea cozy. Most stories of this kind read like some weird admixture of Carver and Updike, but flat, very flat. This kind of fiction normally sets my teeth on edge. There are only so many times you can read about passive-aggressive people unsuccessfully battling their own ennui before you decide to successfully battle your own by throwing the book out the window. So when I read the first page of Fox's book, I knew the landscape I was in, and I prepared to cringe. Much to my surprise, she won me over, and I quickly came to love it.

I consider Fox's book the apotheosis of all New Yorker stories. It's the kind of story Beattie could write if she ever woke up to the larger resonance of her work -- that is, if she ever woke up, period. Sophie is blank and passive, but never boring. Fox pushes her heroine's emotions out into the book's lush description, and the resulting mood is both bleak and oppressive in an almost Eastern-European, gulag-survivor way. The tone of the book is dry almost to the point of deadness, but there is a creepy undertow to the plot that is simply thrilling. The concept of the book reads like an exercise from writing class ("write about divorce without mentioning the divorce"), but the execution is that of a master of craft, writing on levels that resonate both personally and politically. This book is a good antidote to those who would romanticize the late sixties-early seventies, since Fox seems to suggest that society has lost all ability to restrain its worst impulses, leaving everyone in America with a sense of impending doom.

In short, it's a little gem. Not everyone will love this book, but I imagine that everyone will be rewarded by seeing a masterwork that has spawned so many poor imitations. It has been over-praised -- one famous author compared it to "The Death of Ivan Ilych" -- but it has also been underrated. It's a good read. Check it out.

Rating:
Summary: Paula Fox is no Richard Yates
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of those rare novels that defy categorization
Review: This is one to read and re-read, the type of book that goes beyone formulaic to stretch the boundaries of good writing. Every time I've read this one, something new jumps out at me, revealing new depths to the characters and events in this spare, tightly written book. There is a strange sense of forboding from the very beginning of this novel, from the moment Sophie Bentwood is viciously bitten on the hand by a stray cat, a cat she has been feeding for days. Although the bite festers and swells, she denies the potential seriousness of the bite. Denial, in fact, is the way both Sophie and her husband, Otto, seem to face many events in their life, from the emptiness of being in a childless marriage, the odd purposelessness of much of their life and even Otto's recent estrangement with his business partner. While I suppose this book could be seen as the portrait of a marriage, it was far, far more than that to me. Paula Fox writes books for both readers and writers, with prose that is both eloquent and spare and with a sense of time and place that is unique and special, filled with small gems of description, vivid and revealing. For an enlightening look at the world AND for pure reading pleasure, she can't be beat!

Rating:
Summary: A novel for "intellectuals."
Review: What a novel, nearly perfect in its scope, metaphors, characterization. A portrait of New York City, 1970, a dying marriage. Particularly good is the chapter describing Sophie's affair of several years earlier, and the description of the Long Island caretaker's family. I can't believe I never read this before. Fantastic.