Desperate Characters - Softcover

Fox, Paula; Franzen, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393351106 ISBN 13: 9780393351101

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review:

Absorbing, elegant.--Charles Winecoff

This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream.--Frederick Busch

Packed with lucid insights.--Isabella Biedenharn

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.--Marisa Silver

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.--Andrew O'Hehir

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0393351106
• ISBN 13: 9780393351101
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192