Desperate Characters

"...she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as at struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sunk its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified...."

Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Otto is in the process of dissolving his longtime law partnership with Charlie Russell. Cracks are beginning to show in Otto and Sophie's marriage, and outside, all around are signs that civil society is falling apart.

One evening after dinner, Sophie gives a saucer of milk to a stray cat on their back porch. As she bends down to pet the cat, it viciously bites her. Over the next three days she show more ponders, Will she get rabies and die? or Will nothing happen? Sophies ambivalence was said, by Jonathan Franzen in the forward to the edition I read, to resemble Hamlet, a "morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means...." Over the three days as Sophie tries to decide what to do, then waits test results, the book builds enormous suspense. I found the writing to be exquisite, and I underlined many phrases. (I will probably put a few at the end of this review). I will definitely be searching for more to read by Paula Fox

4 1/2 stars

Incidentally David Foster Wallace called this book "A towering landmark of postwar Realism." And Jonathan Franzen says this book and Fox are better than her contemporaries Updike, Roth, and Bellow.

First line: "Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously."

Last lines: "The voice from the telephone went on and on like gas leaking from a pipe. Sophie and Otto had ceased to listen. Her arms fell away from his shoulders as they both turned slowly to the wall, turned until they could both see the ink running down to the floor in black lines...."

Here are a few more quotes:

"What the owners on the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and direction."

"All around them were official buildings, with the peculiarly threatening character. of large carnivorous animals momentarily asleep."

Otto and Charlie were like "smiling people in a swimming pool, kicking each other under water."

"She had only recently realized that one was old for a very ong time." show less

This was a dark and foreboding read about a comfortably well-off New York couple and the seeping uncontrollable infiltration of the ugly side of the world into their lives. At the beginning the wife is bitten by a stray cat, and as the bite gets steadily worse she sees it as an ominous omen about all that's becoming unhinged in their lives, from the encroachment of the poorer part of their Brooklyn neighbourhood on their home to the collapse of her husband's business partnership and a sense of unexplained destabilisation between the couple.

The writing was cleverly unsettling which I enjoyed; you're not sure where Fox is ultimately taking you, but you know that it's not going to be somewhere pink and fluffy. There's the sense that the show more couple themselves can't get a grip on their own emotions, which leaves us discombobulated and unsure as readers.

This isn't a novel that particularly goes anywhere plot-wise, but it's stylishly written quicksand and a dark snapshot of an elitist white middle-class marriage in an evolving 1960s New York.

I appreciated and enjoyed this novel, and can see how it would be a great novel for literary criticism, but I doubt I'll spend too much time looking back on it.

3.5 stars - a short, dark and unsettling ride. show less

Wow! Because I don't pay attention to Jonathan Franzen, I had not heard of Paula Fox until I watched the TV show You. What a shame that the book is still not better known.

Fox is a writer's writer. Her language is concise and revealing. Her metaphors are witty. A couple that I particularly liked:

"He wasn't a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats."

"A nurse with a face that looked as if it had been drawn by a child with a pink crayon."

Nothing much happens, but the suffocation, claustrophobia, and unhappiness are palpable all the way through. These lives have already been chosen, and there's seemingly no way out, no way to change them. The affair fizzles, the discussed adoption of a child will never take show more place, and on and on. The couple is stuck with each other, stationary, in a world that is changing rapidly around them. Their misery culminates in a scene that Fox writes as both shocking and fairly mundane.

It's a book that's hard to describe. You'll just have to read it. show less

Pretty great story of a modern (circa 1970) NYC marriage, bookended by a feral cat bit and whether or not the wife has rabies. In the course of the short book, we have a window, mostly into the wife, her affair, her ennui, her discomfort with her unhappy husband. Wondering if there is any more- but both wife and husband are so empty ... just trying to go on and this is so well portrayed. The lack of connection between them is finally broken with the husband's outrage at his former law partner (yelling into the phone and the world) and he sees an ink bottle and throws it violently against the wall. The wife flung her arms around him so tightly that for a moment he could not move. Pretty beautiful. I heard about this because of the tv show more show called You. show less

Talk about a Bad Weekend

In her 1970 novel, Paula Fox gives readers an intimate view of a 15-year-old marriage that has devolved into nearly unspoken rancor. Layered on that is the split-up of two legal associates, and even broader two worlds, one of privilege, the other poor, colliding into each other, sending seismic shudders through the former. These themes of martial and social discontentment expressed often as feelings of desperation in the novel ring as true today as they did in one of America’s most tumultuous periods encompassing the upheavals of the mid to late 1960s, which is probably a large part of the reason the novel has been enjoying renewed popularity.

Fox sets the novel in a Brooklyn undergoing gentrification. This puts show more two classes of residents next to each other, the more privileged professionals like the Bentwoods and a variety of poorer immigrants and African-Americans. Otto Bentwood practices law in a small two-person firm with his partner Charlie Russel. Otto and Charlie are men of contrasts, Otto more restrained and bound by a certain strict decorum and literal reading of the law, Charlie more given to helping the downtrodden, a bleeding heart, if you will. Otto thinks of him as a showman. After years of partnership, they have agreed to breakup, but parting has proven to be embittering. Sophie Bentwood works as a French-English translator. Lately, however, she hasn’t taken on work and lacks any desire to do so anytime soon. She spends most of her time ruminating over her relationship with Otto, for she feels they have reached a point in their marriage where they are simply going through the motions. A few years before the weekend of the novel, she engaged in an affair with one of Otto’s clients and she thinks often of the man, Francis, and how she felt during the affair; that is, that she felt something. At the outset of the novel, Sophie is bitten by a stray cat she has been feeding at their backdoor, and this sets off moments of sharp exchanges between Otto and her, indecision on her part and fear of consequences, and further thoughts each of them have toward each other, to associates and friends, and to those in their neighborhood. These might be summed as those you reach out to bitting your extended hand.

Fox uses terse prose that moves the story along quickly and focuses on Sophie and Otto. You get the sense that not only have they moved beyond each other but that the world has left them behind as it changes rapidly. They feel their frustration with their personal relationship and their relationship with everything surrounding them, Otto at the office, Sophie with her friends, and both with the neighborhood and their second home on the Island. No amount of words or piercing introspection provides answers and they are left silent and angry at the end.

Classify this as a penetrating examination of a moment in the lives of a middle-aged couple in transition without much clue how to deal with it. show less

Talk about a Bad Weekend

In her 1970 novel, Paula Fox gives readers an intimate view of a 15-year-old marriage that has devolved into nearly unspoken rancor. Layered on that is the split-up of two legal associates, and even broader two worlds, one of privilege, the other poor, colliding into each other, sending seismic shudders through the former. These themes of martial and social discontentment expressed often as feelings of desperation in the novel ring as true today as they did in one of America’s most tumultuous periods encompassing the upheavals of the mid to late 1960s, which is probably a large part of the reason the novel has been enjoying renewed popularity.

Fox sets the novel in a Brooklyn undergoing gentrification. This puts show more two classes of residents next to each other, the more privileged professionals like the Bentwoods and a variety of poorer immigrants and African-Americans. Otto Bentwood practices law in a small two-person firm with his partner Charlie Russel. Otto and Charlie are men of contrasts, Otto more restrained and bound by a certain strict decorum and literal reading of the law, Charlie more given to helping the downtrodden, a bleeding heart, if you will. Otto thinks of him as a showman. After years of partnership, they have agreed to breakup, but parting has proven to be embittering. Sophie Bentwood works as a French-English translator. Lately, however, she hasn’t taken on work and lacks any desire to do so anytime soon. She spends most of her time ruminating over her relationship with Otto, for she feels they have reached a point in their marriage where they are simply going through the motions. A few years before the weekend of the novel, she engaged in an affair with one of Otto’s clients and she thinks often of the man, Francis, and how she felt during the affair; that is, that she felt something. At the outset of the novel, Sophie is bitten by a stray cat she has been feeding at their backdoor, and this sets off moments of sharp exchanges between Otto and her, indecision on her part and fear of consequences, and further thoughts each of them have toward each other, to associates and friends, and to those in their neighborhood. These might be summed as those you reach out to bitting your extended hand.

Fox uses terse prose that moves the story along quickly and focuses on Sophie and Otto. You get the sense that not only have they moved beyond each other but that the world has left them behind as it changes rapidly. They feel their frustration with their personal relationship and their relationship with everything surrounding them, Otto at the office, Sophie with her friends, and both with the neighborhood and their second home on the Island. No amount of words or piercing introspection provides answers and they are left silent and angry at the end.

Classify this as a penetrating examination of a moment in the lives of a middle-aged couple in transition without much clue how to deal with it. show less

The lives of an upper-middle class couple are jarred when the wife, Sophie, is bitten by a stray cat at the same time her husband, Otto, and his business partner, Charlie, are breaking up their law firm. The action takes place over a week while Sophie worries about whether to take the necessary medical steps that might lead to painful rabies shots. Otto and Charlie have been so dependent on each other while hating the way the other handles clients. The break is a series of push and pulls. Lots of critics loved this book, but I found little to like in the characters. I literally only finished it to find out about the bite.