Desperate Characters

by Paula Fox, Jonathan Franzen (Introduction)

Overview

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels

One of the New York Times' 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years

"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 in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage—and a society—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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351101
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/30/2015
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	157,325
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Paula Fox (1923—2017) was 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.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

April 22, 1923

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended Columbia University

What People are Saying About This

Rosellen Brown

One of the few novels I've quite literally kept near me over the years, to re—read regularly. It's a model of profound and worldly insight and elegant style….Paula Fox's beautifully calibrated sense of scale demonstrates the power of brevity and reticence. It's thrilling to see her book made available again.

David Foster Wallace

A towering landmark of postwar realism….A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine that it seems less written than carved.

Andrea Barrett

A perfect short novel. A few characters, a small stretch of time; setting an action tightly confined—and yet, as in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared.

Editorial Reviews

"Fox dissects a marriage and a social class with the sharpest of knives, cannily undermining not only one couple’s false pieties and deceptive comforts but our own as well."

Marisa Silver

"Desperate Characters is a hard, bitter, extreme little book that is somehow full of humanity. It has a brilliant narrative device: a cat bite that may or may not be rabid serves as a kind of tow line pulling us through the novel. I’ve seldom read a book with so much nastiness that manages never to disdain its characters. Extraordinary."

The Millions - Garth Greenwell

"The first time I read Desperate Characters…I fell in love with it."

Jonathan Franzen

"[Desperate Characters]—tense, quick, prickling with suppressed panic—is very much of its time and has a lot to say to ours, too. If you’ve never read it, or if, like me, it’s been a while since you did, now is an excellent moment to pick it up."

The New Yorker - Alexandra Schwartz

"Paula Fox’s narrative feels singular, particularly in the way it captures, through effervescently intelligent dialogue, the tenuousness of intimate relationships."

New York Times - Rose Courteau

"This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream."

Frederick Busch

"Packed with lucid insights."

Entertainment Weekly - Isabella Biedenharn

"Absorbing, elegant."

Entertainment Weekly - Charles Winecoff

"A perfect short novel…As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared."

Andrea Barrett

"A masterwork of economical prose…Remarkable…[O]ne can only wonder who is more fatally deluded—the desperate characters of the Bentwoods' era or the hyperconfident ones of our own."

Salon - Andrew O'Hehir

[Fox has an] acute sense of individual and social psychology.

NY Times Book Review

As a writer, Fox is all sensitive staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina....Fox lays the bricks of her paragraphs with precision and doesn't trowel in much interpretation between them, which doesn't make her a minimalist, just careful. She picks up and uses pieces of daily life that most writers would leave lying on the ground, assuming that they could spot them in the first place.
— New York Magazine

Walter Kirn

Brilliant…[Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.

The New Yorker