What is Sophie running from? The fourth time I read Desperate Characters, I hoped I’d 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. I consoled myself with the idea that good fiction is defined, in large part, by its refusal to offer the easy answers of ideology, the cures of a therapeutic culture, or the pleasantly resolving dreams of mass entertainment. Maybe Desperate Characters wasn’t so much about answers as about the persistence of questions. I was struck by Sophie’s resemblance to Hamlet—another morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while 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 comes not from a ghost but from a cat bite, and her agony is less about uncertainty than about an 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 moment of revelation. It’s a moment of relief.
A book that has fallen even briefly out of print can put a strain on 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 this 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 “rustling” clients), and just as something is surely missing in Charlie’s character, a second “1” is missing in his surname. I do admire how the old-fashioned and vaguely Teutonic name “Otto” saddles Otto, much as his own 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 the book in its entirety, I’m amazed by how much of it is still fresh and unfamiliar to me. I never paid attention, for example, to Otto’s anecdote, late in the book, about Cynthia Kornfeld and her husband the anarchist artist. I’d never noticed how Cynthia Kornfeld’s jello-and-nickels salad mocks the Bentwood equation of food and privilege and civilization, or how the notion of typewriters retrofitted to spew nonsense prefigures the novel’s closing image, or 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 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. 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. As Sophie and Otto suffer from too-intimate knowledge of each other, I now suffer from too-intimate knowledge of Desperate Characters. My underlining and marginal annotations 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. 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 yet here the novel is, soaring above every other work of 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 whiteout absence of meaning. The tracking and deciphering and organizing of life’s significance can swamp the actual living of it, and in Desperate Characters the reader is not the only one who’s swamped. The Bentwoods themselves are highly literate, thoroughly modern creatures. 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 her equation of a crisis in a marital partnership with a crisis in a business partnership and a crisis in American urban life. More than anything else, it’s the slow cresting of a crushingly heavy wave of literary significance. Sophie consciously and explicitly invokes rabies as a metaphor for her emotional and political plight, and even as Otto breaks down and cries out about how desperate he is, he cannot avoid “quoting” (in the postmodern sense) his and Sophie’s earlier conversation about Thoreau, thereby invoking all the other themes and dialogues threading through the weekend, in particular Charlie’s vexing of the issue of “desperation.” As bad as it is to be desperate, it’s even worse to be desperate and also be aware of the vital questions of public law and order and privilege and Thoreauvian interpretation that are entailed in your private desperation, and to feel as if by breaking down you’re proving a whole nation of Charlie Russels right. 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