Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Sophie stood motionless in the hall. The living room looked smudged, flat. Objects, their outlines beginning to harden in the growing light, had a shadowy, totemic menace. Chairs, tables, and lamps seemed to have only just assumed their accustomed positions. There was an echo in the air, a peculiar pulsation as of interrupted motion. Of course, it was the hour, the light, her fatigue. Only living things do harm. She sat down suddenly on a Shaker bench. Fourteen shots in the belly. Fourteen days. And even then, there was no guarantee; you died from rabies, you choked to death. What pity could she expect? Who would pity her in her childish terror, her evasion, her pretense that nothing much had happened? Life had been soft for so long a time, edgeless and spongy, and now, here in all its surface banality and submerged horror was this idiot event--her own doing--this undignified confrontation with mortality. She thought of Otto, and ran up the stairs.

One night, at her home in Brooklyn, Sophie Bentwood is bitten by a feral cat she's been feeding. Her hand swells up and her husband Otto urges her to go to a doctor, but she resists, and none seem to be available on the weekend anyway. She drags her hurt hand to a party, and then a midnight rendezvous with Otto's law firm partner Charlie, who has just been kicked out of the practice by Otto. As the bite gets worse, the fractures in her marriage, and their middle-class urban life, begin to widen. She fears tetanus, then rabies, but there is a darker fear that lurks beneath this crisis, one characterized by the old Thoreau chestnut the characters drag out to wield at each other like knives: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

On one level, Desperate Characters is a recognizable sort of mid-century novel about marriages that go to rot at the heart of the bourgeois circumstances that the 1950's promoted as the home of human flourishing: Revolutionary Road, Rabbit, Run, Light Years, Appointment in Samarra, Household Words. They feel like a literary cliche I guess, but man, those books really did exist, even if most of them were good. Cold, rigid Otto snipes at Sophie's helplessness, imperious toward the crisis of the cat bite but utterly unable to address the deeper fear that haunts her--and him as well. Sophie spends much of the short novel fantasizing about her former lover, Francis, wondering if things might have been different. There is a suggestion, as in all of these books, that such ennui is inescapable. As Otto's sentimental ex-partner Charlie tells him, "no oppression had ever been so difficult to resist as middle-class oppression, because it wears a thousand faces, even the face of revolution, and that it is an insatiable gut that can even nourish itself on the poison its enemies leave around to destroy it."

But Desperate Characters is an urban book, not a suburban one, like all those others. It's a Brooklyn book. What I liked best about it, I think, is how it depicts a gentrifying Brooklyn: the Bentwoods live in what is probably Cobble Hill--they walk to a party in Brooklyn Heights--at the time, a mix of "slum" houses and upwardly-mobile people like the Bentwoods. Otto is digusted by what he sees as the neighborhood's more unsavory elements, which are all racially coded: a drunken black man vomiting across the street, another who barges into the house, desperate to use the Bentwood's telephone. Fleeing to their Hamptons cottage, they find everything smashed by vandals, as if all their refuges have been violated. The threat of rabies, then, and the marauding cat, become a symbol for an encroaching world of disorder: "God, if I am rabid," Sophie thinks to herself, "I am equal to what is outside."

But, of course, who ever assured them that their investment property was a refuge from what is "outside" in the first place? Now that I think about it, Desperate Characters is not so much like those mid-century novels of suburbia, but about the very beginnings of "urban renewal," and the importation of suburban anxieties back onto the urban landscape. Charlie accuses Otto of insensitivity toward poorer clients, and clients of color, and this accusation aligns with the clash of personality that has driven their separation. Which is to say that, as always, the personal is political--even when it doesn't seem to be. In one turn of phrase that is indicative of the novel's richness of style, Fox describes the "official buildings" of downtown Brooklyn--the court houses--as having "the peculiarly threatening character of large carnivorous mammals momentarily asleep." What I like about Desperate Characters is how well it understands the political and economic framework that governs "quiet desperation," as surely Thoreau knew, and which Updike and John O'Hara would rather have forgotten. And it does all that in a story in which little more happens than a woman being bitten by a cat.