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Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox

This classic of literary fiction, first published in 1970, is also a classic example of a novel that was lost to readers, then found. In 1999, when this—and all Paula Fox’s adult novels—fell out of print, interest in the author and her work was almost single-handedly revived by Jonathan Franzen, who called Desperate Characters the “greatest realist novel of the postwar era.”

Though it wasn’t the first such accolade to come along. When the book was reissued in 1980, Irving Howe compared it to other great short novels of the century, including Billy Budd and The Great Gatsby. Nearly two decades later, David Foster Wallace described the novel as a “towering landmark of postwar Realism…A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved.”

Paula Fox’s Unusual Life

Fox is the author of numerous novels for adults and children, as well as two memoirs. She currently lives in Brooklyn, and is perhaps best known for Desperate Characters, though her 2001 memoir, Borrowed Finery, was widely praised for its portrayal of the abandonment by her parents when she was a girl.

Fox is a writer who, to my mind, aligns with writers such as Mavis Gallant and A.S. Byatt. Thomas Mallon called her style “Dickensian” and “molecular,” comparing it to Nicholson Baker’s in the depth of its detail. The novel concerns a couple Sophie and Otto Bentwood, a childless, well-to-do couple who have renovated a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Their three-story home of polished floors and beautiful art and carpets and unique objects is surrounded by street crime, addicts, and feral cats. It’s one feral cat in particular that launches the action, when a sympathetic Sophie gives it a saucer of milk and it ungratefully, and viciously, scratches her.

But it is Sophie’s determination to ignore the wound, even as it festers and grows worse, that drives the tension. Soon additional afflictions surface, as though the environment and the marriage and even the world the couple inhabits is similarly infected. As Fox writes, “Illnesses do their work secretly, their ravages are often hidden.”

A Writer of Gorgeous Sentences

The writing is nonpareil. Here’s Fox describing an ashtray: “On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef.” Or here, a party:

“Now it was like the labored conversation among guests at a late hour after there is nothing more to say, nothing but ashes in the fireplace, dishes in the sink, a chill in the room, a return to ordinary estrangement.”

Decades after it was first published, Desperate Characters continues to find readers—and deservedly so. What’s confounding is how this excellent book fell into obscurity in the first place.

You can read the story about how Desperate Characters was reintroduced to a new generation of readers here.

 —Lauren Alwan

About Paula Fox

Paula Fox (April 22, 1923 – March 1, 2017) was an American author known for writing novels for both adults and children. Her work in children’s literature was highly acclaimed, earning her the prestigious biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, which is considered the highest international recognition for children’s book authors.

Additionally, she received several other notable awards, including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer, the 1983 National Book Award in the Children’s Fiction (paperback) category for A Place Apart, and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for A Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition, Ein Bild von Ivan. In recognition of her literary achievements, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame in 2011.

Audiobook Titles by Paula Fox

Other LitStack Resources

Be sure and look at our other LitStack Reviews for our recommendations on books you should read, as well as these reviews by Lauren Alwan, and these reviews by Sharon Browning.

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