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No End to It: Rereading Desperate Characters

On a first reading, Desperate Characters is a novel of suspense. Sophie Bentwood, a forty-year-old Brooklynite, is bitten by a stray cat to which she’s given milk, and for the next three days she wonders what the bite is going to bring her: death of rabies? shots in the belly? nothing at all? The engine of the book is Sophie’s cold-sweat dread. As in more conventional suspense novels, the stakes are life and death and, perhaps, the fate of the Free World. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free World’s leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit, and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred. Otto’s longtime friend and law partner, Charlie Russel, quits the firm and attacks Otto savagely for his conservatism. Otto complains that a slovenly rural family’s kitchen says “one thing” to him—it says die—and, indeed, this seems to be the message he gets from almost everything in his changing world. Sophie, for her part, wavers between dread and a strange wish to be harmed. She’s terrified of a pain she’s not sure she doesn’t deserve. She clings to a world of privilege even as it suffocates her.

Along the way, page by page, are the pleasures of Paula Fox’s prose. Her sentences are small miracles of compression and specificity, tiny novels in themselves. This is the moment of the cat bite:

She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

By imagining a dramatic moment as a series of physical gestures—by paying close attention—Fox makes room here for each aspect of Sophie’s complexity: her liberality, her self-delusion, her vulnerability, and, above all, her married-person’s consciousness. Desperate Characters is the rare novel that does justice to both sides of marriage, both hate and love, both her and him. Otto is a man who loves his wife. Sophie is a woman who downs a shot of whiskey at six o’clock on a Monday morning and flushes out the kitchen sink “making loud childish sounds of disgust.” Otto is mean enough to say, “Lotsa luck, fella” when Charlie leaves the firm; Sophie is mean enough to ask him, later, why he said it; Otto is mortified when she does; Sophie is mortified for having mortified him.

The first time I read Desperate Characters, in 1991, I fell in love with it. It seemed to me obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. It seemed inarguably great. And because I’d recognized my own troubled marriage in the Bentwoods’, and because the novel had appeared to suggest that the fear of pain is more destructive than pain itself, and because I wanted very much to believe this, I reread it almost immediately. I hoped that the book, on a second reading, might actually tell me how to live.

It did no such thing. It became, instead, more mysterious—became less of a lesson and more of an experience. Previously invisible metaphoric and thematic densities began to emerge. My eye fell, for example, on a sentence describing dawn’s arrival in a living room: “Objects, their outlines beginning to harden in the growing light, had a shadowy, totemic menace.” In the growing light of my second reading, I saw every object in the book begin to harden in this way. Chicken livers, for example, are introduced in the opening paragraph as a delicacy and as the centerpiece of a cultivated dinner—as the essence of old-world civilization. (“You take raw material and you transform it,” the leftist Leon remarks much later in the novel. “That is civilization.”) A day later, after the cat has bitten Sophie and she and Otto have started fighting back, the leftover livers become bait for the capture and killing of a wild animal. Cooked meat is still the essence of civilization; but what a much more violent thing civilization now appears to be! Or follow the food in another direction; see Sophie, shaken, on a Saturday morning, trying to shore up her spirits by spending money on a piece of cookware. She goes to the Bazaar Provençal to buy herself an omelet pan, a prop for a “hazy domestic dream” of French ease and cultivation. The scene ends with the saleswoman throwing up her hands “as though to ward off a hex” and Sophie fleeing with a purchase almost comically emblematic of her desperation: an hourglass egg timer.

Although Sophie’s hand is bleeding in this scene, her impulse is to deny it. The third time I read Desperate Characters—I’d assigned it in a fiction-writing class that I was teaching—I began to pay more attention to these denials. Sophie issues them more or less nonstop throughout the book: It’s all right. Oh, it’s nothing. Oh, well, it’s nothing. Don’t talk to me about it. THE CAT WASN’T SICK! It’s a bite, just a bite! I won’t go running off to the hospital for something as foolish as this. It’s nothing. It’s much better. It’s of no consequence. These repeated denials mirror the underlying structure of the novel: Sophie flees from one potential haven to another, and each in turn fails to protect her. She goes to a party with Otto, she sneaks out with Charlie, she buys herself a present, she seeks comfort in old friends, she reaches out to Charlie’s wife, she tries to phone her old lover, she agrees to go to the hospital, she catches the cat, she takes to bed, she tries to read a French novel, she flees to her beloved country house, she thinks about moving to another time zone, she thinks about adopting children, she destroys an old friendship: nothing brings relief. Her last hope is to write to her mother about the cat bite, to “strike the exact note calculated to arouse the old woman’s scorn and hilarity”—to make her plight into art, in other words. But Otto throws her ink bottle at the wall.

What is Sophie running from? The fourth time I read Desperate Characters, I hoped I’d get an answer. I wanted to figure out, finally, whether it’s a happy thing or a terrible thing that the Bentwoods’ life breaks open on the last page of the book. I wanted to “get” the final scene. But I still didn’t get it. I consoled myself with the idea that good fiction is defined, in large part, by its refusal to offer the easy answers of ideology, the cures of a therapeutic culture, or the pleasantly resolving dreams of mass entertainment. Maybe Desperate Characters wasn’t so much about answers as about the persistence of questions. I was struck by Sophie’s resemblance to Hamlet—another morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means, and finally puts himself in the hands of a providential “divinity” and accepts his fate. For Sophie Bentwood, the ambiguous message comes not from a ghost but from a cat bite, and her agony is less about uncertainty than about an unwillingness to face the truth. Near the end, when she addresses a divinity and says, “God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,” it’s not a moment of revelation. It’s a moment of relief.

A book that has fallen even briefly out of print can put a strain on the most devoted reader’s love. In the way that a man might regret certain shy mannerisms in his wife that cloud her beauty, or a woman might wish that her husband laughed less loudly at his own jokes, though the jokes are very funny, I’ve suffered for the tiny imperfections that might prejudice potential readers against Desperate Characters. I’m thinking of the stiffness and impersonality of the opening paragraph, the austerity of the opening sentence, the creaky word “repast.” As a lover of the book, I now appreciate how the formality and stasis of this paragraph set up the short, sharp line of dialogue that follows (“The cat is back”), but what if a reader never makes it past “repast”? I wonder, too, if the name “Otto Bentwood” might be difficult to take on first reading. Fox generally works her characters’ names very hard—the name “Russel,” for instance, nicely echoes Charlie’s restless, furtive energies (Otto suspects him of “rustling” clients), and just as something is surely missing in Charlie’s character, a second “1” is missing in his surname. I do admire how the old-fashioned and vaguely Teutonic name “Otto” saddles Otto, much as his own compulsive orderliness saddles him; but “Bentwood,” even after many readings, remains for me a little artificial in its bonsai imagery. And then there’s the title of the book. It’s apt, certainly, and yet it’s no The Day of the Locust, no The Great Gatsby, no Absalom, Absalom! It’s a title that people may forget or confuse with other titles. Sometimes, wishing it were stronger, I feel lonely in the peculiar way of someone deeply married.

As the years have gone by, I’ve continued to dip in and out of Desperate Characters, seeking comfort or reassurance from passages of familiar beauty. Now, though, as I reread the book in its entirety, I’m amazed by how much of it is still fresh and unfamiliar to me. I never paid attention, for example, to Otto’s anecdote, late in the book, about Cynthia Kornfeld and her husband the anarchist artist. I’d never noticed how Cynthia Kornfeld’s jello-and-nickels salad mocks the Bentwood equation of food and privilege and civilization, or how the notion of typewriters retrofitted to spew nonsense prefigures the novel’s closing image, or how the anecdote insists that Desperate Characters be read in the context of a contemporary art scene whose aim is the destruction of order and meaning. And Charlie Russel—have I ever really seen him until now? In my earlier readings he remained a kind of stock villain, a turncoat, an egregious man. Now he seems to me almost as important to the story as the cat. He’s Otto’s only friend; his phone call precipitates the final crisis; he produces the Thoreau quotation that gives the book its title; and he delivers a verdict on the Bentwoods—“drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them”—that feels ominously dead-on.

At this late date, however, I’m not sure I even want fresh insights. As Sophie and Otto suffer from too-intimate knowledge of each other, I now suffer from too-intimate knowledge of Desperate Characters. My underlining and marginal annotations are getting out of hand. In my latest reading, I’m finding and flagging as vital and central an enormous number of previously unflagged images involving order and chaos and childhood and adulthood. Because the book is not long, and because I’ve now read it half a dozen times, I’m within sight of the point at which every sentence will be highlighted as vital and central. This extraordinary richness is, of course, a testament to Paula Fox’s genius. There’s hardly an extraneous or arbitrary word to be found in the book. Rigor and thematic density of such magnitude don’t happen by accident, and yet it’s almost impossible for a writer to achieve them while relaxing enough to allow the characters to come alive, and yet here the novel is, soaring above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War.

The irony of the novel’s richness, however, is that the better I grasp the import of each individual sentence, the less able I am to articulate what grand, global meaning all these local meanings might be serving. There’s finally a kind of horror to an overload of meaning. It’s closely akin, as Melville suggests in “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick, to a total whiteout absence of meaning. The tracking and deciphering and organizing of life’s significance can swamp the actual living of it, and in Desperate Characters the reader is not the only one who’s swamped. The Bentwoods themselves are highly literate, thoroughly modern creatures. Their curse is that they’re all too well equipped to read themselves as literary texts dense with overlapping meanings. In the course of one late-winter weekend, they become oppressed and finally overwhelmed by the way in which the most casual words and tiniest incidents feel like “portents.” The enormous suspense the book develops is not just a product of Sophie’s dread, then, or of Fox’s step-by-step closing of every possible avenue of escape, or of her equation of a crisis in a marital partnership with a crisis in a business partnership and a crisis in American urban life. More than anything else, it’s the slow cresting of a crushingly heavy wave of literary significance. Sophie consciously and explicitly invokes rabies as a metaphor for her emotional and political plight, and even as Otto breaks down and cries out about how desperate he is, he cannot avoid “quoting” (in the postmodern sense) his and Sophie’s earlier conversation about Thoreau, thereby invoking all the other themes and dialogues threading through the weekend, in particular Charlie’s vexing of the issue of “desperation.” As bad as it is to be desperate, it’s even worse to be desperate and also be aware of the vital questions of public law and order and privilege and Thoreauvian interpretation that are entailed in your private desperation, and to feel as if by breaking down you’re proving a whole nation of Charlie Russels right. When Sophie declares her wish to be rabid, as when Otto hurls the ink bottle, both seem to be revolting against an unbearable, almost murderous sense of the importance of their words and thoughts. Small wonder that the last actions of the book are wordless—that Sophie and Otto have “ceased to listen” to the words streaming from the telephone, and that the thing written in ink which they turn slowly to read is a violent, wordless blot. No sooner has Fox achieved the most dazzling success at finding order in the nonevents of one late-winter weekend than, with the perfect gesture, she repudiates that order.

Desperate Characters is a novel in revolt against its own perfection. The questions it raises are radical and unpleasant. What is the point of meaning—especially literary meaning—in a rabid modern world? Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it’s opposed? Why not be rabid? Why torment ourselves with books? Rereading the novel for the sixth or seventh time, I feel a cresting rage and frustration with its mysteries and with the paradoxes of civilization and with the insufficiency of my own brain and then, as if out of nowhere, I do get the ending—I feel what Otto Bentwood feels when he smashes the ink bottle against the wall—and suddenly I’m in love all over again.

Jonathan Franzen

January 1999