Desperate Characters

Reviews / Votes

"[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." -- Alexandra Schwartz - The New Yorker "Paula Fox's narrative feels singular, particularly in the way it captures, through effervescently intelligent dialogue, the tenuousness of intimate relationships." -- Rose Courteau - New York Times "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." -- Andrew O'Hehir - Salon "The first time I read Desperate Characters...I fell in love with it." -- Jonathan Franzen "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." -- Marisa Silver "Absorbing, elegant." -- Charles Winecoff - Entertainment Weekly "Packed with lucid insights." -- Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly "A perfect short novel...As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared." -- Andrea Barrett "This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream." -- Frederick Busch "Desperate Characters is a hard, bitter, extreme little book that is somehow full of humanity. It has a brilliant narrative device: a cat bite that may or may not be rabid serves as a kind of tow line pulling us through the novel. I've seldom read a book with so much nastiness that manages never to disdain its characters. Extraordinary." -- Garth Greenwell - The Millions