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"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." — David Foster Wallace
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed — echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters 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, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."
"Desperate Characters is, simply, a perfect short novel. A few characters, a small stretch of time; setting and action tightly confined — and yet, as in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared." — Andrea Barrett "This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream." — Frederick Busch "Brilliant. . . . [Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time." — The New Yorker Introduced by Jonathan Franzen, one of Granta's Twenty Best Young American Novelists
Paula Fox is the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Author biography courtesy of Henry Holt and Company.
"My first job was working in a dress shop in Los Angeles in 1940, for $7 a week."
"I like to cook; it is, for me, a happy combination of mindlessness and purpose."
Anonymous
Posted August 27, 2003
Sophie and Otto living in a childless, closely entwined -- loving yet passionless relationship are caught up in the New York City of the seventies. The flower children and hippies are receding into the colorful past while the age of gentrifciation emerges. Sophie in an act of kindness to an ugly stray cat, is bitten and the spectre of rabies begins to plague her. The fear of painful injections and the unwillingness to deal with the reality of her situation results in Sophie's depressive reassessment of her past life -- her failed relationships and the current state of her marriage. Otto is confronting the breakup with his long term business partner and is also driven to reevaluating the importance and true nature of intimacy and mutual dependency. The city with it's mixture of poverty and affluence -- side by side -- in the new era of slum resettlement is the backdrop for the lives of sometimes desperate people but all of them ever so human.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 13, 2012
The introduction takes up the whole sample book. It's the author I want to sample not you.
1 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 15, 2011
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Posted April 8, 2009
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Overview
"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." — David Foster Wallace
Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ...