I work at a bookstore in Berkeley, California; so, as one can imagine, I get and give book recommendations often. Many of these recommendations I am compelled to ignore, because between that job and my other one, the writing I try to muster on a semi-regular, frequently infrequent basis, the stack of books calling to be read on my bookshelf, and the myriad other tasks that compile my current life, it is simply impossible to read every book I’m told is great. That said, I’ll take heed of a recommendation when the recommender’s passion for a particular title is so intense, so contagious, that I catch it like the cold.
Such was the case of my encounter with the last book I loved, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. A coworker instructed—nay, implored—me to read it. She knows I like dark stories and sparse writing, and that Coetzee is one of my favorite authors. It is a small book, she said, in every way possible; one that will hit you slowly, gradually, but truly and fully.
The novel follows Otto and Sophie Bentwood–a childless couple living in Brooklyn during the late 1960s–over one quietly devastating weekend. Superficially, the two are the picture of urban sophistication and middle age success: he runs a flourishing legal firm and she freelances as a literary translator when she feels like it. Yet, this particular weekend finds the Bentwoods confronting heartbreak, a reexamination of choices, and a relentless sense of dread.
That dread begins almost immediately in the opening scene, when a stray cat bites Sophie as she tries to feed it. From there, Fox reminds the reader of the cat bite with an uneasy persistence; it looms over every compact, tightly woven scene thereafter.
Everyone tells Sophie to see a doctor—the cat might be rabid, they say. She assures them it’s “nothing.” But the cut on her hand grows, turns yellow, and bleeds. She feels dizzy sometimes and needs to sit down. It is a constant presence throughout the story—a foreboding, jarring howl that made me at first hazily uneasy and eventually genuinely frightened. The slow crescendo of panic surrounding this book reminded me of Jonny Greenwood’s film score for There Will Be Blood—a sustained, ambiguous noise that only grows more piercing and morose as the characters devolve.
What follows after the book’s first chapter is a stunning examination of bourgeois detachment and urban decay. Fox presents a litter-infested but gentrifying Brooklyn where comfortable white adults like the Bentwoods live among counterculture hooligans who throw rocks into their windows while hastily dressed “Negro men” barge into their brownstones to use their phone.
A blurb on the novel’s front page says the book can be “savored in one sitting,” which I find to be a more apt description of, say, eating a slice of apple pie than reading Desperate Characters. I read the book in three anxious sessions, each one approached more tentatively than the one before it, as the story is so powerful and subtly ominous, the characters’ pain so vivid—so, yes, desperate—that I could only take so much before having to set it down.
Fox’s prose is elegant and crass and refined and calculated at once. It is a perfect example of the old writing adage, “Omit needless words;” nary a word is out of place here, and the sparseness with which she uses them only heightens their importance.
I haven’t read any of Fox’s other novels, and I may not seek out her other work for a long while, because she has said so much (with so little) in Desperate Characters that I’m going to need time to distill it all before bracing myself for more of her beautiful prose. The urge will come, though, eventually. I’m sure of it.
