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Title: Desperate Characters: A Novel by Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen ISBN: 039331894X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2
Rating: 5
Summary: One of those rare novels that defy categorization
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: One of The Finest American Novels of the Twentieth Century
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: One of the Finest American Novels of the Last Century
Comment: 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.
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Title: Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox ISBN: 0805071849 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 02 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Poor George: A Novel by Paula Fox, Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0393321312 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Widow's Children by Paula Fox, Andrea Barrett ISBN: 0393319636 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen ISBN: 0374173273 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Strong Motion: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen ISBN: 031242051X Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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