Books |
Desperate Characters
Paula Fox
By
Published: Oct 10, 2021
Category:
Fiction
Jonathan Franzen has just published a novel, Crossroads, and “everybody” is either writing about it or chatting with him. Elle had some questions. What Franzen most wanted to talk about was “Desperate Characters.” It’s “the book that helped me through a breakup.” It’s “the book I’ve reread the most.” It’s “the book that makes me feel seen… I first read it in 1991, following my separation from my then wife. It not only rescued me emotionally but changed the course of my work as a novelist.” Years ago, he was just as effusive: “There’s hardly an extraneous or arbitrary word to be found in the book…This novel soars above all the other American realist fiction since the Second World War.
“Desperate Characters” is set in Brooklyn, a borough so chic it can cost more to live there than it does to live in Manhattan. It offers large apartments in ancient brownstones on tree-lined streets, restaurants with varying degrees of pretension, and, most of all, a community of smart young people who both consume and create — Brooklyn is like Greenwich Village forty years ago. That is, Greenwich Village with money and privilege.
Paula Fox got all that decades early…in 1970.
Sophie and Otto Bentwood may be pioneers, but they don’t live that way. The bookcases are filled with “the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets. The floors are cedar.
And then comes a catalog of privilege:
Mrs. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast.
Over dinner, Sophie notices that a stray cat has returned. She gives it some milk. And is rewarded for her kindness with a nasty bite on the hand.
Blood gushes. Her hand swells. The pain is intense.
And yet Sophie makes no move to go to a hospital and get a rabies shot.
In fact, she doesn’t get to the hospital until page 109 of this 156-page novel. Why not? Because the bite is a kind of metaphor for America in the throes of the Vietnam War, though the war is never directly named. And the bite is a metaphor for this marriage, which is more troubled than it appears.
Not much happens. A legal partnership dissolves. An affair is reviewed and resolved. A dinner party ends with a rock through a window. A phone call is like a slap in the face. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. To stream the movie, starring Shirley MacLaine, click here.]
Paula Fox writes with precision and control; when “Desperate Characters” was first published, critics lined up to praise it. And they weren’t wrong — in three days, we learn all we need to know about a handful of characters. And we experience something rare: a concise piece of writing that is, for once, equal to the hype.
