 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2021) |
 First edition | |
| Author | Paula Fox |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Set in | Brooklyn, New York |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace |
Publication date | 1970 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 156 |
| ISBN | 0-393-35110-6 |
Desperate Characters is a 1970 novel by Paula Fox.
Sophie and Otto Bentwood are a childless, upper-middle class married couple who live in a brownstone in Brooklyn. She is a translator, he an attorney, currently preoccupied by the acrimonious break-up of his long-time business partnership. The action of the novel unfolds in a single long weekend following an incident in which a stray cat bites Sophie on the hand. Though she refuses to see a doctor, Sophie worries incessantly that she may have contracted rabies.
Sophie attends a party, lunches with a friend, shops for kitchen appliances, and drives with Otto to their country home. On a night-time walk with Otto's partner, Charlie Russel, she inadvertently confesses to having had an affair. A series of disquieting events – a rock thrown through a bedroom window, a mysterious phone call, the vandalism of the country house – unnerve the Bentwoods, heightening the fragility of their emotional states and their marriage.
On Monday morning, Sophie announces aloud, with "extraordinary relief", "God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside." Shortly afterwards, however, it is established that she is not rabid. Yet on the telephone to an acquaintance, Sophie lashes out; and when Otto arrives home from work, to a phone call from Charlie, he finally has an outburst of rage, hurling against the wall a bottle of ink with which Sophie had planned to write a letter to her mother.
The title, Desperate Characters, comes from a sentence in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden : “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
In the novel, Charlie and Sophie discuss Charlie's "desperation," and Otto tells Sophie that he and Charlie had recently argued over the Thoreau quote. Charlie had written the quote down, in order to stare at it, and called it "a prime example of middle-class self-love." This began a fierce argument between the two men. In the final scene, the motif of desperation returns: Charlie, demanding to speak to Otto on the telephone, yells out that he's desperate, and Otto shouts, "He's desperate!" before throwing the ink bottle at the wall.
In Martha Conway's words, Desperate Characters "has at its center the social upheaval—real or imagined" of the 1970s. [1] Signs of the collapse of the social order intrude into the Bentwoods' lives, mirroring the impending collapse of their marriage. [2] Although Sophie and Otto never actually suffer any severe harm over the weekend, this is itself a source of tension, creating unease and foreboding. [3] The suspense comes from the anticipation – both the Bentwoods' and the reader's – of "implosion." [4]
Franzen has also suggested that Desperate Characters should be "read in the context of a contemporary art scene whose aim is the destruction of order and meaning." The Bentwoods, highly cultured and literate, are tormented by "an overload of meaning," which ultimately resembles the absence of any meaning: they are "oppressed and finally overwhelmed by the way in which the most casual words and tiniest incidents feel like 'portents.'" Sophie and Otto's outbursts on Monday, therefore, are read as the Brentwoods "revolting against an unbearable, almost murderous sense of the importance of their words and thoughts." [2]
The novel also alludes to class and racial tensions – such as in a scene in which the Brentwoods uneasily allow a black man to use their home telephone. Fox has said of the novel, "There’s a kind of muted drumbeat, which is what racial tension always sounds like to me, except when it explodes." [5]
Desperate Characters fell out of print until its 1980 reissue by Godine, which included an afterword by Irving Howe. [3] After another period out of print, it was reissued in 1999 by W.W. Norton, with a preface by Jonathan Franzen. The 1999 reissue was inspired by the publication in Harper’s of "Why Bother?", in which Franzen lauds the novel. [6] [7] It has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Greek, and Slovak.
The novel received generally good reviews both upon its release and in subsequent printings. Howe, in his afterword to the 1980 reissue, placed it within "a major American tradition, the line of the short novel exemplified by Billy Budd , The Great Gatsby , Miss Lonelyhearts and Seize the Day ": a tradition in which "everything—action, form, language—is fiercely compressed, and often enough, dark-grained as well." [8] In his preface to the new edition, Franzen called it the greatest realist novel of the postwar era.
The book was made into a movie starring Shirley MacLaine in 1971. Fox did not like the movie: "The whole thing lacked a certain kind of inner gravity." [7]
The book was referenced in the first season of the Netflix series You .
| Authority control databases: National |
|---|
Master and Commander is a nautical historical novel by the English author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1969 in the US and 1970 in the UK. The book proved to be the start of the 20-novel Aubrey–Maturin series, set largely in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, on which O'Brian continued working until his death in 2000.
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Cujo is a 1981 horror novel by American writer Stephen King about a rabid Saint Bernard. The novel won the British Fantasy Award in 1982 and was made into a film in 1983.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
Anna "Nan" Shepherd was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.
The Thirteen-Gun Salute is the thirteenth historical novel in the Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1989. The story is set during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812.
The Price of Salt is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan." Highsmith—known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train—used an alias as she did not want to be tagged as "a lesbian-book writer", and she also used her own life references for characters and occurrences in the story.
Paula Fox was an American author of novels for adults and children and of two memoirs. For her contributions as a children's writer she won the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978, the highest international recognition for a creator of children's books. She also won several awards for particular children's books including the 1974 Newbery Medal for her novel The Slave Dancer; a 1983 National Book Award in category Children's Fiction (paperback) for A Place Apart; and the 2008 Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for A Portrait of Ivan (1969) in its German-language edition Ein Bild von Ivan.
A Dirty Job is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 2006. While reflecting the author's absurdist tendencies, the content of the novel draws significantly from his own experiences in tending to the needs of close family and friends in the stages of dying.
Sophie Hannah is a British poet and novelist.
The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield is a gothic suspense novel, the author's first published book.
Desperate Characters is a 1971 American drama film produced, written, and directed by Frank D. Gilroy, who based his screenplay on the 1970 novel of the same name by Paula Fox.
Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and called by some critics the "Great American Novel". In 2022, it was announced that Freedom would be adapted for television.
Rabies has been the main plot device or a significant theme in many fictional works. Due to the long history of the virus as well as its neurotropic nature, rabies has been a potent symbol of madness, irrationalism, or an unstoppable plague in numerous fictional works, in many genres. Many notable examples are listed below.
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.
"Why Bother?", originally published as "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels", is a literary essay by American novelist Jonathan Franzen. It is often referred to as "The Harper's Essay". First published in the April 1996 issue of Harper's magazine, the essay concerns the persistence of reading within the context of technological growth and distraction. Franzen recounts his meditations on the state and possibility of the novel form, often against the backdrop of his personal experience, eventually concluding that the novel still has potential cultural agency in the United States, and often gains it by paradoxical drives of both culture and author.
The Widow’s Children is a novel by American writer Paula Fox, first published in 1976. The book evoked bewilderment as well as praise when first published. Reissued once in 1986, it went out of print in 1990. A paperback was issued by publisher W. W. Norton in 1999. It is considered by many to be Fox's masterpiece.
Laura Norton is an English actress, known for her role as Kerry Wyatt on the ITV soap opera Emmerdale. Norton has also appeared in numerous television series working for ITV and the BBC, and has significant theatre credits, including The Royal Shakespeare Company and the Live Theatre Company.
Nicotine is a satirical 2016 novel by US novelist Nell Zink. It follows the character of Penny as she deals with both the death of her father and squatters in one of his properties. The book was well received by critics.
The City In the Middle of the Night is a 2019 climate-fiction novel by Charlie Jane Anders. It is set on a tidally locked planet, where human life, surrounded by hostile alien life, is mostly divided between two archetypically different urban sites. The main story focuses on two characters whose actions take them outside of the cities.
