Desperate Characters: A Novel (Paperback)

"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.

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.