Desperate Characters - by Paula Fox (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel 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" and "The Great Gatsby".<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn. Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage--and a society--wrenching itself apart.</p><p>First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, <em>Desperate Characters</em> 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 <em>Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts</em>, and <em>Seize the Day</em>.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>[<em>Desperate Characters</em>]--tense, quick, prickling with suppressed panic--is very much of its time and has a lot to say to ours, too. If you've never read it, or if, like me, it's been a while since you did, now is an excellent moment to pick it up.--Alexandra Schwartz "The New Yorker"<br><br>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 "Salon"<br><br>A perfect short novel...As in Tolstoy's <em>The Death of Ivan Ilyich</em>, everything crucial within our souls bared.--Andrea Barrett<br><br>Absorbing, elegant.--Charles Winecoff "Entertainment Weekly"<br><br>Packed with lucid insights.--Isabella Biedenharn "Entertainment Weekly"<br><br>The first time I read <em>Desperate Characters</em>...I fell in love with it.--Jonathan Franzen<br><br>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<br><br>This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream.--Frederick Busch<br>
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