Paula Fox

A Novel

Desperate Characters

Clean, tense, gorgeous, engagingly impenetrable 

Gabe Cortez

Gavin

Good portentous realism.
Wife: "Oh, never mind what I say." 
Husband: "I don't and I can't."
Fox draws intense, evil significance out of ordinary irritations (a cat bite, a smashed window, a feud at work) - as we do when at our lowest. It's dark without being Gothic; apocalyptic without melodrama; heartbroken without self-pity. On a hospital waiting room:
It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes... a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind... 
The quiet, careful way that every character is sketched in their paranoia is convincing, and unnerving. Sure, it's about upper-middle class people's pain, but that's still pain. The least tractable kind, in fact.

First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, this harrowing novel digs deep into the lives of Otto and Sophie Bentwood, whose seemingly perfect marriage begins to crack much as post-war society is cracking around them. Reprint.

Trever

This was really good. The relationship between Otto and Sophie feels real, and reading their dialogue, you can picture a married couple saying these things. I can't speak to the portrayal of 1960's Brooklyn, but the way it's shown in relation to their interaction is brilliant. This is definitely one I want to return to.

Christopher McCaffery

Sara

MY VIDEO ON THIS BOOK: https://youtu.be/SHe5oREDs6M

A feral cat bites Sophie Bentwood who, since the beginning of the story, starts wondering what consequences that bite might have on her. Her husband is Otto, he's a lawyer and at the beginning we get to know that he has problems with his business partner. Sophie and Otto represent the 60s urban middle-class of New York. They are educated and very cultured people. Otto loves Sophie whereas Sophie — who has a liberal spirit, weighed down by the awareness of being a married lady — turns to alcohol, trying to find the meaning of the things around her. She seems to be the most complex and desperate character of the whole story.

The essence of the novel is the pain — and the fear of pain, too. Among all the things, Desperate Characters talks about a very tormented marriage: Sophie walks around the streets of the city with the doubt of what might happen due to the bite, but she doesn't want to go to the hospital yet, she's thinking about an affair that she had with one of his husband's clients, and all of this sounds like a metaphor. The truth is, all she is doing is trying to comfort herself, but nothing seems to work. Seeing an old good friend, buying a gift, catching the cat, reading a book, thinking about moving to another house or adopting a child: these are just illusions that she's using to be distracted and get away from reality, which doesn't seem to satisfy her.

This book should be read more than one time to be fully properly understood. Sometimes it seems to be a book on the language of lovers — an ambiguous language. Some other times it seems to be Sophie's story, a lady who doesn't actually know herself. But it also seems to be a book on the mere desperation, which comes from being aware of limits, rules, consequences, choices that sometimes we have to make under the pressure of society.

Definitely, I would recommend this book to any type of reader. The writing is simple but not bland, I like how well Paula Fox — the writer — could describe the situations, the environment, and the feelings of the characters. The words she chose are very accurate and severe in the way they unfold reality in the reader's mind. This is definitely one of the most underrated American novels and I'd love to hear about it more often.

How did I discover this book? The Netflix TV show, "You", actually made me aware of it. In the show, one of the characters goes to a bookstore and buys *Desperate Characters*, after the bookseller Joe said that it's a great novel.

Yasemin

A Great American Novel – from the author of ‘Borrowed Finery’.

Will Butt

First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature--a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd" and "The Great Gatsby".

Desperate Characters A Novel

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