Farther Away : Essays

NO END TO IT

[rereading Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters]

On a first reading, it’s 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: Shots in the belly? Death by rabies? 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 the fate of the Free World. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late sixties, when the civilization of the Free World’s leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit, excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred. Otto’s longtime friend and law partner, Charlie Russel, quits the firm and attacks him savagely for his conservatism. “I wish someone would tell me how I can live,” Otto says. Sophie herself wavers between dread and a strange disappointment at the possibility that she hasn’t been infected. 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 simply 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 enough of a jerk to say “Lotsa luck, fella” when Charlie leaves the firm; Sophie is enough of a jerk 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 struck me as plainly superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, or Saul Bellow. It struck me as obviously great, and a few months later, although I’m usually in no hurry to do this, I reread it. I’d recognized my own troubled marriage in the Bentwoods’, and the novel had appeared to suggest that the fear of pain is more destructive than pain itself, and I wanted very much to believe this. I actually believed that the book, on a second reading, might 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 melted into prominence, like images in a random-dot autostereogram. 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 like this. 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, later on. “That is civilization.”) It’s the livers’ smell, their richness, that first draws the problematic cat to the Bentwoods’ back door. A hundred pages later, after the cat has bitten Sophie (the “idiot event”), she and Otto start fighting back. They’re in the jungle now, and the leftover chicken livers have 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 eerily bearded saleswoman throwing up her hands “as though to ward off a hex” and Sophie fleeing with a purchase so perfectly wrong, so emblematic of her desperation, that it’s almost funny: 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: “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, desperate-sounding denials reflect 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 for “unlawful excitement,” 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 makes an “ostrich nest” of pillows, 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 to 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, and so I took refuge in the idea that good fiction is “tragic” in its refusal to offer the easy answers of ideology, the cures of a therapeutic culture, or the pleasantly resolving dreams of mass entertainment. I was struck by Sophie’s resemblance to Hamlet — himself a morbidly self-conscious character who receives a message that’s both extremely disturbing and necessarily ambiguous (it comes from a ghost), goes through agonizing mental contortions 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 is not a ghostly admonition but a straightforward cat bite; the ambiguity is entirely inside her: “It was only her hand, she told herself, yet the rest of her body seemed involved in a way she couldn’t understand. It was as though she’d been vitally wounded.” The mental contortions that follow this insight are not about her uncertainty but about her 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 revelation. It’s a “relief.”

A book that has fallen, however briefly, out of print can put a strain on even 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 the 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 literally “rustling” clients), and just as something is surely missing in Charlie’s character, a second “l” is missing in his surname. I do admire how the old-fashioned and vaguely Teutonic name “Otto” saddles Otto the way his 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 it in its entirety to prepare this introduction, I’m amazed by how much of the book is still fresh and unfamiliar to me. I never paid much attention, for example, to Otto’s anecdote, late in the book, about Cynthia Kornfeld and her husband the anarchist artist — how Cynthia Kornfeld’s salad of Jell-O and nickels mocks the Bentwood equation of food and privilege and civilization; how the notion of typewriters retrofitted to spew nonsense subtly prefigures the novel’s closing image; 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 then there’s 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 is. 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. A serious danger in long marriages is how excruciatingly well you come to know the object of your love. Sophie and Otto suffer from their knowledge of each other, and I now suffer from my knowledge of Desperate Characters. My underlining and marginal annotation of it 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. And, 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 the novel to be written, and yet here the novel is, soaring above all the other 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 white-out absence of meaning. It’s also, not incidentally, a leading symptom of diseased mental states. Manics and schizophrenics and depressives often suffer from the conviction that absolutely everything in their lives is fraught with significance — so fraught, indeed, that tracking and deciphering and organizing the significance can overwhelm the actual living of life. In the case of Otto and especially of Sophie (who is urged by two different doctors to seek psychiatric treatment), the reader is not the only one who’s overwhelmed. The Bentwoods themselves are highly literate, thoroughly modern characters. 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 equating a crisis in a marital partnership with a crisis in a business partnership and a crisis in American urban life. More than anything else, I think, it’s the slow cresting of a crushingly heavy wave of literary significance. Sophie consciously and explicitly evokes rabidness as a metaphor for her emotional and political plight, while Otto, in his last line, even as he finally breaks down and cries out about how desperate he is, cannot avoid “quoting” (in the postmodern sense) his and Sophie’s earlier conversation about Thoreau and thereby invoking all the other themes and dialogues threading through the weekend, in particular Charlie’s vexing of the issue of “desperation”: how much worse than simply being desperate it is to be desperate and also to be aware of the vital questions of public law and order and privilege and Thoreauvian interpretation that are entailed in that private desperation, and to feel that by breaking down you’re proving Charlie Russel right, though you know in your heart he’s wrong. 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.