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.

First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters 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, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."

About the Author
Paula Fox (1923-2017) was the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow's Children, A Servant's Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books.

Reviews
"[Desperate Characters]-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
"Paula Fox's narrative feels singular, particularly in the way it captures, through effervescently intelligent dialogue, the tenuousness of intimate relationships." -- Rose Courteau - New York Times
"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
"The first time I read Desperate Characters...I fell in love with it." -- Jonathan Franzen
"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
"Absorbing, elegant." -- Charles Winecoff - Entertainment Weekly
"Packed with lucid insights." -- Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly
"A perfect short novel...As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared." -- Andrea Barrett
"This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream." -- Frederick Busch
"Desperate Characters is a hard, bitter, extreme little book that is somehow full of humanity. It has a brilliant narrative device: a cat bite that may or may not be rabid serves as a kind of tow line pulling us through the novel. I've seldom read a book with so much nastiness that manages never to disdain its characters. Extraordinary." -- Garth Greenwell - The Millions



Book Information
ISBN 9780393351101
Author Paula Fox
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 175g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 140mm * 15mm