Desperate Characters (novel)
Desperate Characters is a 1970 novel by Paula Fox.
Plot
Sophie and Otto Bentwood are a childless, upper-middle class married couple who live in a brownstone in Brooklyn. She is a translator, he an attorney, currently preoccupied by the acrimonious break-up of his long-time business partnership. The action of the novel unfolds in a single long weekend following an incident in which a stray cat bites Sophie on the hand. Though she refuses to see a doctor, Sophie worries incessantly that she may have contracted rabies.Sophie attends a party, lunches with a friend, shops for kitchen appliances, and drives with Otto to their country home. On a night-time walk with Otto's partner, Charlie Russell, she inadvertently confesses to having had an affair. A series of disquieting events – a rock thrown through a bedroom window, a mysterious phone call, the vandalism of the country house – unnerve the Bentwoods, heightening the fragility of their emotional states and their marriage.
On Monday morning, Sophie announces aloud, with "extraordinary relief", "God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside." Shortly afterwards, however, it is established that she is not rabid. Yet on the telephone to an acquaintance, Sophie lashes out; and when Otto arrives home from work, to a phone call from Charlie, he finally has an outburst of rage, hurling against the wall a bottle of ink with which Sophie had planned to write a letter to her mother.
Title
The title, Desperate Characters, comes from a sentence in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”In the novel, Charlie and Sophie discuss Charlie's "desperation," and Otto tells Sophie that he and Charlie had recently argued over the Thoreau quote. Charlie had written the quote down, in order to stare at it, and called it "a prime example of middle-class self-love." This began a fierce argument between the two men. In the final scene, the motif of desperation returns: Charlie, demanding to speak to Otto on the telephone, yells out that he's desperate, and Otto shouts, "He's desperate!" before throwing the ink bottle at the wall.
Themes
In Martha Conway's words, Desperate Characters "has at its center the social upheaval—real or imagined" of the 1970s. Signs of the collapse of the social order intrude into the Bentwoods' lives, mirroring the impending collapse of their marriage. Although Sophie and Otto never actually suffer any severe harm over the weekend, this is itself a source of tension, creating unease and foreboding. The suspense comes from the anticipation – both the Bentwoods' and the reader's – of "implosion."Franzen has also suggested that Desperate Characters should be "read in the context of a contemporary art scene whose aim is the destruction of order and meaning." The Bentwoods, highly cultured and literate, are tormented by "an overload of meaning," which ultimately resembles the absence of any meaning: they are "oppressed and finally overwhelmed by the way in which the most casual words and tiniest incidents feel like 'portents.'" Sophie and Otto's outbursts on Monday, therefore, are read as the Bentwoods "revolting against an unbearable, almost murderous sense of the importance of their words and thoughts."
The novel also alludes to class and racial tensions – such as in a scene in which the Bentwoods uneasily allow a black man to use their home telephone. Fox has said of the novel, "There’s a kind of muted drumbeat, which is what racial tension always sounds like to me, except when it explodes."