Month: May 2011

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Desperate Characters was published in 1970 yet amazes with it’s timely portrait of malaise and fear in reaction to a chaotic and changing world.  In a gentrifying Brooklyn, Sophie and Otto’s marriage is fragile thing, both touching and intimate and also distanced and layered with secrets and small, everyday meanness. The book follows Sophie in the aftermath of a cat bite as she tries to negotiate what to do about the bite, her connection to Otto and the recent estrangement from close colleagues.  It’s not the plot that drives us through but Fox’s vision, which is at once miniature and epic. Is it offensive to call novels by women domestic? The term seems to imply that men don’t also live in domestication, as if our coffee, our food, the beds we sleep in, our bodies and the doorway we come home to everyday isn’t absolutely essential to our lives regardless of our sex.  Yet the lens through which we see the world falling apart is necessarily domestic and central to our lives. Like Fox’s our view is limited (it’s a short novel) fractured, ambivalent, and above all, detailed. A portrait of a marriage is the lens here and through Sophie and Otto we see race and class and life unfolding in America and also intimacy itself—a delicate yet strengthening, embroidered and mysterious thing. Often termed a “writer’s writer,” Fox has written a book that remains central among her peers—Roth, Updike, Delillo—and beloved by younger authors like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. (The latter wrote the book’s forward.) In its stylish, Franzen writes, “carved” prose she shows us all, writers and readers how each word is precious.  I know I will return to savor its elegant prose many times.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Remainder is a rare novel that is both seemingly simple and ultimately profound.  In basic increments we hear the facts that build to something we couldn’t have imagined: In the accident something fell from the sky. Our protagonist knows nothing about what is was but a lawsuit has granted him 8 million pounds for damages. The London world he lives in passes before him like a dream with a few concrete images holding it in place—a phone booth, his car parked in a certain spot on the street, the plain couch and TV which hold him in the months of unemployment following the accident.  His essential detachment from all that came before (a kind of exaggeration of our alienation) enable him to see the world as comprised of the building blocks of objects and strings of events in which objects move or are affected. In other words, narrative.  The engine for the book becomes what he does with the money. There are no grand scale bacchanalias or missions to stop hunger and save the world as his various friends suggest. In fact there is little morality or pleasure in Remainder. What is there is cold observation, the accumulation of events and objects and the eerie remaking—via architects, set designers, builders– of reality. Some may maintain that this remaking is in fact the making of art. I admire McCarthy’s chilly method but am left wondering what—aside from method and technique– constitutes the making of art.