Desperate Characters: A Novel

Description

"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

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Meet the Bentwoods, Sophie and Otto, "both just over forty," living in Brooklyn sometime in the '60s with neither hope nor children to encourage them to work on their suffocating marriage. Such are the central subjects of Paula Fox's enthralling Desperate Characters, first published to much acclaim in 1970. The novel's action unfolds in a single weekend, and includes Otto's torturous breakup with his longtime business partner, Charlie, and a visit the Bentwoods make to their country home, which they find vandalized. Everything pivots around an occurrence so ordinary as to make us marvel at the power it wields under Fox's brilliant pressure: a cat bite.

Despite Otto's protests, Sophie puts out a dish for a stray that roams the Bentwoods' neighborhood--an area which is also home to enormous poverty, and in which they, in their renovated townhouse, sit like distant royalty. The cat sinks its teeth into her hand and instantly we are plunged into the heart of what plagues every aspect of this couple's lives: the threat of rabies. Where the cat is concerned, it's literal rabies, but the book is also steeped in the sense that a kind of social rabies lurks just outside the Bentwoods' and indeed the whole world's door. As Sophie suddenly realizes at one point: "Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy."

Throughout Fox's gorgeously crafted, unflinching portrait of a dying marriage and a country at war with itself, the Bentwoods fight the desire to self-destruct like everything around them. At one point, Otto screams at Sophie: "What in God's name do you want? Do you want Charlie to murder me? Do you wish the farmhouse had been burned down?... Do you want to be rabid?" She doesn't, of course, but in a certain way, that outcome makes sense. "'God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,' she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she'd discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence." How fortunate and rare to discover such a perfect articulation of the human condition. --Melanie Rehak

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The Slave Dancer

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• Condition: New
• ISBN13: 9781416971399

Description

One day, thirteen-year-old jessie Bollier is earning pennies playing his fife on the docks of New Orleans; the next, he is kidnapped and thrown aboard a slave ship, where his job is to provide music while shackled slaves "dance" to keep their muscles strong and their bodies profitable. As the endless voyage continues, Jessie grows increasingly sickened by the greed, brutality, and inhumanity of the slave trade, but nothing prepares him for the ultimate horror he will witness before his nightmare ends -- a horror that will change his life forever.

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Poor George: A Novel

Description

Paula Fox’s stunning first novel—available for the first time since its initial publication in 1967.

Poor George gives us George Mecklin, a restless, soft-spoken teacher at a private school in Manhattan. Depressed by his life of vague moral purpose, George discovers a local adolescent named Ernest breaking into his house. Rather than hand the boy over to the police, as his nagging wife insists, George instead decides to tutor him. His life consequently implodes. Filled with vividly acid portrayals of American life in the 1960s, prescient explorations of suburban anomie, and a riotously disturbing cast of supporting characters, Poor George is a classic American novel—further reminder of Paula Fox’s astonishing literary gifts.

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Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

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In this elegant, wrenching memoir, Paula Fox looks at her childhood with the same detached acceptance of life's arbitrary cruelties that informs such acclaimed novels as Desperate Characters. Born in 1923, she was abandoned at a Manhattan foundling home by her alcoholic father at the insistence of her panic-stricken, 19-year-old mother. Paul and Elsie Fox were in no way prepared to take on the responsibility of a child, although they couldn't leave her alone either. Fox's austere narrative unflinchingly describes the couple swooping down on their daughter, who was being raised in upstate New York by a kindly minister, for visits that were as alarming as they were intermittent. For reasons best known to themselves (Fox does not attempt to analyze their motives), they removed her from the minister's home when she was 6, then bounced her among relatives, schools, and their own disordered care for the next 12 years, from Hollywood and Long Island to Cuba and Montreal. The restraint with which Fox describes these traumas is a reproach to all those maudlin memoirs of family dysfunction that have been so prevalent in recent years. She demonstrates that you can write about painful experiences honestly without wallowing in self-pity, and her prose here is as perfectly calibrated as it is in her novels. Thank goodness that this sad story is leavened by a running counterpoint of short passages showing young Paula discovering the pleasure of words and the power of literature. Though she too had an unwanted baby at an early age, the book closes with a moving scene of the author's reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption. --Wendy Smith

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The Widow's Children: A Novel

Description

"Chekhovian. . . . Every line of Fox's story, every gesture of her characters, is alive and surprising."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

On the eve of their trip to Africa, Laura Maldonada Clapper and her husband, Desmond, sit in a New York City hotel room, drinking scotch-and-sodas and awaiting the arrival of three friends: Clara Hansen, Laura's timid, brow-beaten daughter from a previous marriage; Carlos, Laura's flamboyant and charming brother; and Peter Rice, a melancholy editor whom Laura hasn't seen for over a year. But what begins as a bon voyage party soon parlays into a bitter, claustrophobic clash of family resentment. From the hotel room to the tony restaurant to which the five embark, Laura presides over the escalating innuendo and hostility with imperial cruelty, for she is hiding the knowledge that her mother, the family matriarch, has died of a heart attack that morning. A novel as intense as it is unerringly observed, The Widow's Children is another revelation of the storyteller's art from the incomparable Paula Fox. "It is the most elegant exploration I have read of the chaos of modern life. . . . There is something marvelously honorable in Fox's work."—Edith Milton, The Nation "A splendid novel. . . . A work of marvelous design and subtle synchronization."—Kirkus Reviews

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First published in 1976, The Widow's Children, with its unpalatable family wistfully gnashing at one another, has long defied critical description. Now that it's been rereleased, with a fine new introduction by Andrea Barrett, it's time again for readers to approach this spare--yet unsparing--novel. Approach with something like terror, or at least a tremulous respect, for Paula Fox's tale of one family's massive, various history awes with its marvelous compression. We learn these people inside and out in just one evening. Divided into seven chapters ("Drinks," "Corridor," "Restaurant," "The Messenger," "Two Brothers," "Clara," "The Funeral"), the book tells of the Maldonadas, Spanish-Cuban immigrants to America who now find themselves middle-aged and living in the past, galvanized only by sister Laura's emotional excesses. "These people," notes Peter, a friend, "had not signed any social contract."

Laura leads her husband, Desmond, her brother, Carlos, her daughter, Clara, and Peter a not-so-merry dance through one acrimonious dinner in a pretentious Manhattan restaurant. Practically the only ugly truth she doesn't manage to dredge up is the one she learned that very afternoon: Alma, Carlos and Laura's mother, has died in a nursing home. But the plot is not what we think about when we say this is a very, very good novel. Fox's marvelous control and formalism ultimately give The Widow's Children its strange, singular power. She has a poet's ability not just to imply unsayable mysteries but to imbue the unsaid with treachery, wit, emotion, and irony, all hanging in a vaporous cloud. Each character in turns speaks a pained monologue; we don't like them--we don't, in a sense, even care--but we can't stop watching this elaborately choreographed car wreck.

Along the way, Fox gets off a number of good ones, as in this description of a neighbor: "a tall muscular man who entered into and departed from rooms quickly, athletically, as though following a secret program of body building." Her wit leavens our impatience with these difficult people. And that's a clever swindle, for she then delivers a chilling tale with infinite grace. This is in no way an expected novel. --Claire Dederer

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The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe

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