Desperate Characters Paperback – March 30, 2015

Reading this novel and I am liking it a lot.

Comedian Susan Eddie Izard once observed that there are no British blockbuster movies because nothing ever happens in British movies. She joked that, unlike American movies full of explosions,murders and noise - British films all consist of people standing still in rooms saying things like “I’m arranging these matches.”Paula Fox’s much-ballyhooed novel felt a lot like that for me -watching two people staring silently at each other in a series of rooms where nothing really happens and no one really does anything except arrange matches.Circling a few days in the lives of two middle-aged dilettantes I kept waiting desperately (get it? “Desperately”) for something (anything!) to actually happen.But nothing does- Sophie gets bitten by a stray cat and worries obsessively she will die from her wound - but won’t go the doctor...and when she finally does she worries obsessively she has rabies.She doesn’t have rabies and nothing happens. The bite gets better.Her husband is dissolving his law practice with a partner who had been a dear friend for years but now these two men can barely stand the sight of each other. Why? Who knows? Nothing really happens there either. His partner behaves badly and yells a bit.And - oh my - the continuous casual racism is hard to stomach. Forty years later, endless references to “Negroes” - their “smell” and their “quaint” ways are tough to read.Ouch.What Fox has an impeccable eye for are the settings these very dull people move through. Her descriptions of the foods people eat, the homes they live in and the clothes they wear are a delight - if only the people in these intricately described spaces ever actually did anything or even interacted with them! Instead it’s like paper dolls - in which static, lifeless figures are just placed in different settings to see how they look. Then they are moved to a different setting to see how they look over here.Everyone at the beginning of this tale is the exact same as they are at the end - no one grows or changes or seems to learn anything at all from their interactions - they just blandly continue moving through landscapes - arranging matches.

I really don't remember downloading this, but I guess the word cat attracted me. I had trouble fixing this in time although it tells you at the start. The content seems in one time and the characters in another. Perhaps it is the perfect little story for our time.

Excellent product and prompt delivery!

Although Paula Fox’s writing is detailed and exquisite, I felt this book was less about the troubling changing of societal norms and more about the character’s inability to accept change. It seems to focus on their fixation with how they perceive “acceptable social behavior” and how everyone around them should act vs how they actually are. Their thoughts hyper focus on their perceptions of everyone around them with every turn of the page. I found myself wondering if this is how the author was viewing society and her disappointment written into two lost, bored and judgmental characters. Almost sad really. Two very lost people that I would hope to never encounter at a dinner party. All in all, no I will not be picking this book up again and gladly donating it.

Sophie and Otto live quite securely; they have money, position, a renovated brownstone, and a Mercedes. Unfortunately the world around them is not behaving in a civilized manner. A cat bites Sophie; a neighbor relieves himself out of his bedroom window; drunks vomit on the sidewalk. Otto and his law partner break up, and their Long Island farmhouse is vandalized. At one point Otto laments "I wish someone could tell me how I can live."These are people viewed at a distance. They are cardboard characters, not because of any ineptness on behalf of the author, but because they truly are made of cardboard. There is no "there" there when we search for the inner beings of Sophie and Otto. One can categorize this novel as a story of a failing marriage, but I don't think that's the case. What we are viewing is a stagnant marriage, but stagnation seems normal for this couple; it is a life for which they are especially suited. Sophie makes sporadic, impulsive attempts to loosen her bondage to this existence: she has an affair; in a sudden rage she calls a friend a "dumb old collapsed bag"; she goes out for drinks with Otto's former partner at 3AM. Yet throughout the book we feel no sympathy for anyone who makes an appearance. Well almost anyone. The guy who empties his bladder out of his bedroom window does seem to be an independent cuss. Maybe we should get to know him better.Oh, and the word pictures, the metaphors, the similes: "her glance rested on Leon and Sophie with remote interest, like someone who does not particularly like fish, but finds herself imprisoned in an aquarium." This is one of many 1970's novels that portray the vacuous nature of the new, spiritually dead, materialistic society (see Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, for example). It's an amazing book. Now I'm off to buy her other novels.

I was unfortunate enough to be forced to read this novel for my 12th grade english class. Luckily, it was a short book that only took a week to read; but for that entire week I was questioning whether it would be benificial to continue living. The "desperate characters" in the story are all a bunch of depressed white-supremists that act irrationally and picky in every details of their lives. The theme that it portrayed was irrelevant and petty. If I went in to detail about the plot, this author would become unemployed because no one would read this. I would rather slowly rip off each of my finger and toe nails than read another page of this book. I would only recomend this novel if you wanted to give it to your worst enemy. If you're like me and had to read it for a class, just take the L--I'm saving your mental sanity.