Desperate Characters (1970) by Paula Fox

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Desperate Characters (1970)

by Paula Fox

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 7/28
New York: 80/105

   Originally published in 1970, Desperate Characters was out of print by 1990 until it was rediscovered by Johnathan Franzen, who wrote a nice essay about it.  A publisher read his essay and the result was that Desperate Characters was re-published to a whole new audience in 1991.  When Paula Fox died in 2017, many of articles focused on this revival and helped elevate it into a quasi-canonical status, where it remains today (the 1991 edition was updated as recently as 2015).  It's a short, sharp novel about a childless white couple living in Brooklyn in the late 1960's.  I would fully agree that this novel was decades ahead of its time- it often seemed to be that, but for the absence of smart phones and the impact of computers, the characters could be in Brooklyn right now, behaving essentially the same way.

  The plot, or plot-lessness, feels very contemporary as well: Basically the wife of this couple- a stay at home type (the husband is a lawyer), gets bit by a cat.  She goes out to lunch a couple of times and talks to a couple friends, then they travel up to their vacation house and find it has been vandalized in their absence.  I'm serious, that's the whole book.  I can certainly understand why it was such a revelation to Franzen back in 1990- finding a novel about contemporary life that holds up for decades afterwards is a rare experience. 

  This is also the first book I can remember out of the 200 or so books from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list that I've read where the main characters were a childless, professional couple.  I've noticed that almost every book in the entire project revolves around the relationship between a parent and their child, typically from the perspective of the child, sometimes from that of the parent.  Usually adults who don't have children in the books on this list are either dramatically dysfunctional or the whole book is about the fact that someone lost a child.