"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." — David Foster Wallace
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."
NY Times Book Review
[Fox has an] acute sense of individual and social psychology.
Walter Kirn
As a writer, Fox is all sensitive staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina....Fox lays the bricks of her paragraphs with precision and doesn't trowel in much interpretation between them, which doesn't make her a minimalist, just careful. She picks up and uses pieces of daily life that most writers would leave lying on the ground, assuming that they could spot them in the first place.
— New York Magazine
Andrea Barrett
A perfect short novel…As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared.”
Frederick Busch
This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream.
The New Yorker
Brilliant…[Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.
Charles Winecoff - Entertainment Weekly
Absorbing, elegant.
Andrew O'Hehir - Salon
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.
Jonathan Franzen
The first time I read Desperate Characters…I fell in love with it.”
Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly
Packed with lucid insights.
Marisa Silver
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.
Alexandra Schwartz - The New Yorker
[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.”
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