Desperate Characters

August 27, 2010

When I was watering my plants this morning, my neighbour’s cat made its daily saunter across the shared backyard fence. It’s a brown, lithe thing, who walks my fence right to left in the morning, left to right in the evening.

The stray cat in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters was perhaps not as jaunty, and instead, somewhat monstrous:

“Its gray fur, the gray of tree fungus, was faintly striped. Its head was massive, a pumpkin, jowled and unprincipled and grotesque.”

And similarly, there’s something disturbing about this book. Nothing entirely violent happens. There’s no murder, there’s no mystery. It is a book about every day life. Life in this late-1960s New York neighbourhood, life in an unhappy household.

A book titled ‘Desperate Characters’ immediately calls to mind survival, of an inevitability, of hopelessness. But the Bentwoods, Otto and Sophie are respectable people. A lawyer. Homeowners. Ordinary people whose lives you wouldn’t ordinarily pay much attention to.

Desperate Characters opens unsuspectingly, drawing you into this routine day:

“Mr and Mrs Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sauteed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast.”

But then that pumpkin-headed stray cat enters the story, when it bites Sophie after she tries to feed it, which terrifies her, although she refuses to go to the hospital. And an array of disorderly incidents occur, adding to the cheerless, rather embittered tale of these characters, this city on the verge of a breakdown.

It is curious that something like this, about these ordinary, hopeless creatures can intrigue and hold. It’s a rather harsh, sharp little book. It’s not a book for everyone – I never thought it would be a book for me, but what a satisfying, quiet read.

PS: It’s quite interesting to read that Paula Fox (who is incidentally, Courtney Love’s grandmother) has written more fiction for children than adults (here’s the Wikipedia link to her works), and had a bit of a sad childhood (here’s the Guardian profile of Fox)

Written by olduvai Posted in Reading, review Tagged with Paula Fox