Paula Fox - Desperate Characters

On a first reading, Desperate Characters is a novel of suspense. Sophie Bentwood, a forty-year-old Brooklynite, is bitten by a stray cat to which shes given milk, and for the next three days she wonders what the bite is going to bring her: death of rabies? shots in the belly? nothing at all? The engine of the book is Sophies cold-sweat dread. As in more conventional suspense novels, the stakes are life and death and, perhaps, the fate of the Free World. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free Worlds leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit, and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred. Ottos longtime friend and law partner, Charlie Russel, quits the firm and attacks Otto savagely for his conservatism. Otto complains that a slovenly rural familys kitchen says one thing to himit says die and, indeed, this seems to be the message he gets from almost everything in his changing world. Sophie, for her part, wavers between dread and a strange wish to be harmed. Shes terrified of a pain shes not sure she doesnt deserve. She clings to a world of privilege even as it suffocates her.

Along the way, page by page, are the pleasures of Paula Foxs prose. Her sentences are small miracles of compression and specificity, tiny novels in themselves. This is the moment of the cat bite:

She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Ottos presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

By imagining a dramatic moment as a series of physical gesturesby paying close attentionFox makes room here for each aspect of Sophies complexity: her liberality, her self-delusion, her vulnerability, and, above all, her married-persons consciousness. Desperate Characters is the rare novel that does justice to both sides of marriage, both hate and love, both her and him. Otto is a man who loves his wife. Sophie is a woman who downs a shot of whiskey at six oclock on a Monday morning and flushes out the kitchen sink making loud childish sounds of disgust. Otto is mean enough to say, Lotsa luck, fella when Charlie leaves the firm; Sophie is mean enough to ask him, later, why he said it; Otto is mortified when she does; Sophie is mortified for having mortified him.

The first time I read Desperate Characters , in 1991, I fell in love with it. It seemed to me obviously superior to any novel by Foxs contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. It seemed inarguably great. And because Id recognized my own troubled marriage in the Bentwoods, and because the novel had appeared to suggest that the fear of pain is more destructive than pain itself, and because I wanted very much to believe this, I reread it almost immediately. I hoped that the book, on a second reading, might actually tell me how to live.