Desperate Characters [Paperback]

They deal with simialar themes and have similar publishing histories. I was also impressed by Jonathon Franzen's zeal in praising Paula Fox, even to the point of calling her "obviously superior" to Updike, Bellow and Roth. WOW ! I thought, if what Franzen says is even partly true, then discovering Paula Fox will be among the happiest occasions of the year for me.

Unfortunately, Franzen and other Fox devotees are wrong. The writing is labored and feels that way. It is amatuerish at best. What you have here is an interesting thinker and potentially talented writer who never really matured in her craft. Great writing is by definition NOT boring. And Paula Fox is boring. DESPERATE CHARCTERS lacks compassion for its characters and any kind of insight into their psychological motivations. We are supposed to accept on faith that these people just [are not good]. The book is intellectually shallow, and the writing is flat.

Spend your money elsewhere. Or don't, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Sound familiar? If it does, then you're probably acquainted with the sort of fiction that was well-nigh done to death in the New Yorker in the seventies and eighties, the kind of tale that Ann Beattie has made her hallmark: an upper middle class family trying to muffle its own despair and ennui with yet another sconce, throw pillow, or tea cozy. Most stories of this kind read like some weird admixture of Carver and Updike, but flat, very flat. This kind of fiction normally sets my teeth on edge. There are only so many times you can read about passive-aggressive people unsuccessfully battling their own ennui before you decide to successfully battle your own by throwing the book out the window. So when I read the first page of Fox's book, I knew the landscape I was in, and I prepared to cringe. Much to my surprise, she won me over, and I quickly came to love it.

I consider Fox's book the apotheosis of all New Yorker stories. It's the kind of story Beattie could write if she ever woke up to the larger resonance of her work -- that is, if she ever woke up, period. Sophie is blank and passive, but never boring. Fox pushes her heroine's emotions out into the book's lush description, and the resulting mood is both bleak and oppressive in an almost Eastern-European, gulag-survivor way. The tone of the book is dry almost to the point of deadness, but there is a creepy undertow to the plot that is simply thrilling. The concept of the book reads like an exercise from writing class ("write about divorce without mentioning the divorce"), but the execution is that of a master of craft, writing on levels that resonate both personally and politically. This book is a good antidote to those who would romanticize the late sixties-early seventies, since Fox seems to suggest that society has lost all ability to restrain its worst impulses, leaving everyone in America with a sense of impending doom.

In short, it's a little gem. Not everyone will love this book, but I imagine that everyone will be rewarded by seeing a masterwork that has spawned so many poor imitations. It has been over-praised -- one famous author compared it to "The Death of Ivan Ilych" -- but it has also been underrated. It's a good read. Check it out.