Desperate Characters

Sophie and Otto live quite securely; they have money, position, a renovated brownstone, and a Mercedes. Unfortunately the world around them is not behaving in a civilized manner. A cat bites Sophie; a neighbor relieves himself out of his bedroom window; drunks vomit on the sidewalk. Otto and his law partner break up, and their Long Island farmhouse is vandalized. At one point Otto laments "I wish someone could tell me how I can live."These are people viewed at a distance. They are cardboard characters, not because of any ineptness on behalf of the author, but because they truly are made of cardboard. There is no "there" there when we search for the inner beings of Sophie and Otto. One can categorize this novel as a story of a failing marriage, but I don't think that's the case. What we are viewing is a stagnant marriage, but stagnation seems normal for this couple; it is a life for which they are especially suited. Sophie makes sporadic, impulsive attempts to loosen her bondage to this existence: she has an affair; in a sudden rage she calls a friend a "dumb old collapsed bag"; she goes out for drinks with Otto's former partner at 3AM. Yet throughout the book we feel no sympathy for anyone who makes an appearance. Well almost anyone. The guy who empties his bladder out of his bedroom window does seem to be an independent cuss. Maybe we should get to know him better.Oh, and the word pictures, the metaphors, the similes: "her glance rested on Leon and Sophie with remote interest, like someone who does not particularly like fish, but finds herself imprisoned in an aquarium." This is one of many 1970's novels that portray the vacuous nature of the new, spiritually dead, materialistic society (see Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, for example). It's an amazing book. Now I'm off to buy her other novels.

This is a well crafted novel with economic and precise descriptions and dialogue. It also evokes a place (New York City) and a time (late 1960s) with well selected details that ring true and give the reader a glimpse into that time in American culture. The scope of the novel is small, so as to better analyze the complexity of human relationships, which is the over-riding quality of the novel. It is a short novel which corresponds well to its concentrated scope in terms of time, place, and situation as well as Fox's ability to select the single word or detail to explain or illustrate larger meaning to the reader.However, I could not give the novel a score of 5, despite its many good qualities. I found the Bentwoods, both Sophie and Otto, to be highly privileged and spoiled. Otto Bentwoods' `know-it-all' responses to almost everything his wife says was irritating. The novel is limited in time, a single weekend, and focuses primarily on the break between Otto and his legal partner, Charlie. These two men appeared to have different styles that complimented each other in both their friendship and legal practice, however I got the impression that after many years, they were somewhat sick of each other.The Bentwoods are highly-educated, wealthy, liberal, and Fox does a good job of showing the intrusion of the real world into their existence. As Fox describes it, the upper class can use their wealth to isolate them from the messiness of poverty but it creeps back in, much like the nasty tom cat that bites Sophie in the first pages of the novel. I once read a quote by Dawn Powell, that youth float on the illusion of luxury. Fox would expand that sensibility to indicate that the upper classes also wish to float on that same illusion but for those over 40 the illusion is about more than luxury, it is about life's consistent and nagging barriers, irritations, complications. The cat bite brings all this messy reality back into Sophie's life.The book is very well written and is admirable in its ability to limit time, place, person, situation for an examination of a situation that generalizes beyond the limitations Fox has created for her art.

I can’t tell if I’m missing something, or the book is. It reads easy, with a lot of dialogue. It almost reads like a play—I could see it easily being transferred to the theater. The prose, while quality, often feels sketchy. I suppose it is “economical,” per one of the glowing blurbs. It is also a barrier between the reader and the story. Transitions happen very quickly—new rooms, new people, new conversations. It can be hard to get a sense of place, or a feel characters, given everything is so fleeting. The book’s brevity, however, is a plus, in my opinion, as I never considered not finishing. In this sense, I suppose the novel is a success.

This is one to read and re-read, the type of book that goes beyone formulaic to stretch the boundaries of good writing. Every time I've read this one, something new jumps out at me, revealing new depths to the characters and events in this spare, tightly written book. There is a strange sense of forboding from the very beginning of this novel, from the moment Sophie Bentwood is viciously bitten on the hand by a stray cat, a cat she has been feeding for days. Although the bite festers and swells, she denies the potential seriousness of the bite. Denial, in fact, is the way both Sophie and her husband, Otto, seem to face many events in their life, from the emptiness of being in a childless marriage, the odd purposelessness of much of their life and even Otto's recent estrangement with his business partner. While I suppose this book could be seen as the portrait of a marriage, it was far, far more than that to me. Paula Fox writes books for both readers and writers, with prose that is both eloquent and spare and with a sense of time and place that is unique and special, filled with small gems of description, vivid and revealing. For an enlightening look at the world AND for pure reading pleasure, she can't be beat!