Desperate Characters

By: Jonathan Franzen, Paula Fox

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Paperback | 30 March 2015

At a Glance

Paperback
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.9 x 14.0 x 1.5

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Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed - echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature - a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."

Industry Reviews

"Brilliant...[Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time." -- The New Yorker "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 "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 "The first time I read Desperate Characters...I fell in love with it." -- Jonathan Franzen

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