Desperate Characters

Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage—and a society—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]—tense, quick, prickling with suppressed panic—is very much of its time and has a lot to say to ours, too. If you’ve never read it, or if, like me, it’s been a while since you did, now is an excellent moment to pick it up.", "Paula Fox’s narrative feels singular, particularly in the way it captures, through effervescently intelligent dialogue, the tenuousness of intimate relationships.", "A masterwork of economical prose…Remarkable…[O]ne can only wonder who is more fatally deluded—the desperate characters of the Bentwoods' era or the hyperconfident ones of our own.", "The first time I read Desperate Characters…I fell in love with it.", "Fox dissects a marriage and a social class with the sharpest of knives, cannily undermining not only one couple’s false pieties and deceptive comforts but our own as well."

Paula Fox (1923—2017) was the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books.