Customer Reviews

Desperate Characters

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This book, along with "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates and "The Recognitions" by William Gaddis, must surely stand as one of the most neglected great books of this century. Fox engages morality rather than painting mordant pictures of supressed decadence and in doing so surpasses decades of American writers that would follow her. This is a book everyone should read for its sad and beautiful profoundity flourishing through a vein of realism that breaks the heart. Surely the best book I've read in years.

It is a textbook for aspiring novelists, this book. Descriptions are so perfectly judged, incidents so astonishingly well balanced, episodes so impeccably resonant with one another, hints and allusions so delicately poised, psychological insights so bewilderingly sharp, that almost any novelist will seem dull-headed by comparison. I went from "Desperate Creatures" to a novel by Cees Nooteboom, and I could hardly stomach it: Nooteboom, by comparison, seems hulkish and animalistically unreflective. His prose is blockish by comparison, and his sense of timing and humor are like crude uncomprehending apings of real wit. It's not Nooteboom's fault: Fox has in dense excess what other novelists sweat to achieve. The number of felicitous, inimitable formulations on each page puts anyone else to shame (except perhaps Flaubert, or Joyce).

But on the other hand. The reason Jonathan Franzen could write about this book in such superlatives is that he is himself very much a product of the "New Yorker" style from the 1970s onward. He is absolutely right that the novel can be read and re-read (he says he's read it six times). He's right, too, that the novel is a kind of model of what novels might be. But one of the Amazon reviewers, Jay Dickson, is also right that this novel is very much a product of the style exemplified -- or should I say moulded? -- by the "New Yorker." And what is wrong with that? The style breeds a kind of virtuosity in which a reader is continuously interrupted, and asked to stand back and admire what has just been deployed with such insouciant effortlessness. A number of times reading "Desperate Characters," I wanted to put the book down, stand up, and applaud. But those moments were more or less quickly followed by brief irritations.

Virtuosity at this level is a snake that bites its own tail, and a novel as "perfect" as "Desperate Characters" chews off little pieces of its own plausibility each time it indulges in another coruscating firework display of outlandishly gorgeous, uncannily insightful, hyper-eloquent, impossibly well-judged description.

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.

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!

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.