Desperate Characters

Desperate Characters is a novel by the American writer Paula Fox, first published in 1970.

The plot is a matter of errands and visits: a party, a lunch with a friend, a shopping trip for kitchen appliances, a drive up to the country house and a walk at night with Otto's former partner during which Sophie admits to an affair. Against that flat surface Fox arranges the incidents that give the book its unease: a rock comes through a bedroom window, the telephone rings and nobody answers, and the country house is vandalised while they are away. Sophie's fear of rabies is treated as a private obsession that everyone around her finds irrational, and the novel lets the reader see that she is not wrong to feel that something has got in. Fox was writing about a particular part of New York in a particular decade, and the book's reputation grew in the years after its publication, largely on the strength of its control: almost nothing is explained and the last line leaves the couple where they were.