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 my own brain and then, as if out of nowhere, I do get the ending—I feel what Otto Bentwood feels when he smashes the ink bottle against the wall—and suddenly I’m in love all over again.
Jonathan Franzen
January 1999
ONE
Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast. A few feet away from the dining room table, an oblong of white, the reflection from a fluorescent tube over a stainless-steel sink, lay upon the floor in front of the entrance to the kitchen. The old sliding doors that had once separated the two first-floor rooms had long since been removed, so that by turning slightly the Bentwoods could glance down the length of their living room where, at this hour, a standing lamp with a shade like half a white sphere was always lit, and they could, if they chose, view the old cedar planks of the floor, a bookcase which held, among other volumes, the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets, and the highly polished corner of a Victorian secretary.
Otto unfolded a large linen napkin with deliberation.
“The cat is back,” said Sophie.
“Are you surprised?” Otto asked. “What did you expect?”
Sophie looked beyond Otto’s shoulder at the glass door that opened onto a small wooden stoop, suspended above the back yard like a crow’s nest. The cat was rubbing its scruffy, half-starved body against the base of the door with soft insistence. Its gray fur, the gray of tree fungus, was faintly striped. Its head was massive, a pumpkin, jowled and unprincipled and grotesque.
“Stop watching it,” Otto said. “You shouldn’t have fed it in the first place.”
“I suppose.”
“We’ll have to call the A.S.P.C.A.”
“Poor thing.”
“It does very well for itself. All those cats do well.”
“Perhaps their survival depends on people like me.”
“These livers are good,” he said. “I don’t see that it matters whether they survive or not.”
The cat flung itself against the door.
“Ignore it,” Otto said. “Do you want all the wild cats in Brooklyn holding a food vigil on our porch? Think what they do to the garden! I saw one catch a bird the other day. They’re not pussycats, you know. They’re thugs.”
“Look how late the light stays now!”
“The days are getting longer. I hope the locals don’t start up with their goddamn bongos. Perhaps it will rain the way it did last spring.”
“Will you want coffee?”
“Tea. The rain locks them in.”
“The rain’s not on your side, Otto!”
He smiled. “Yes, it is.”
She did not smile at him. When she went to the kitchen, Otto quickly turned toward the door. The cat, at that instant, rammed its head against the glass. “Ugly bastard!” Otto muttered. The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away. The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back. Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street. Some windows had rags tacked across them, others, sheets of transparent plastic. From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled. There was a long tear in the middle of it through which he could see the faded pink brick of the wall. The tattered end of the blanket just touched the top frame of a door which, as Otto was about to turn away, opened. A fat elderly woman in a bathrobe shouldered her way out into the yard and emptied a large paper sack over the ground. She stared down at the garbage for a moment, then shuffled back inside. Sophie returned with cups and saucers.
