Please try again.You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.Something went wrong. Accepting the cure would make the possibility of infection real. However if you needed an example of intellectual navel gazing this book would be a perfect example.The title of this book comes from Thoreau's famous dictum that the 'mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', and it is referenced in a fractious exchange between married couple Otto and Sophie and Otto's absent law partner, Charlie - who is the silent, but still important, voice in the conversation. Obviously their marriage is already full of unresolved issues and bitterness but it boils over after Sophie is bit by a cat.

Then there would be nothing - except pain. She is drawn to the vitality of the younger boomer generation, which is bound to hers by what Fox depicts as a posture of mutual contempt. Here is the backstory of a character called Stephanie—or, rather, of her house:Stephanie’d had the foresight to buy at the end of Giuliani’s reign as mayor, only weeks after 9/11 during what would turn out to be the tiniest of real-estate dips.

We moved from Manhattan, from Central Park West. Like many American novels now it is highly filmic or play-like but that's no criticism; it's a form that concentrates prose and makes every word work. I don't know if I've ever read a book with such real, honest and raw explanations of such complicated, almost indescribable emotions. maybe i would have liked the book more if i'd read it with this cover.If it were possible to give a book six stars, this would be the book.I thought this would mostly be a dissection of marriage, but it turned out to be more of a tense observation on class distinction in 1960s NYC, and about how dangerous it is to have too much time on your hands to devote to introspection.“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Henry David Thoreau.How was I bamboozled in this WASPy angst reminiscent of John Cheever or somebody. But there seems to be another message, too, if a harder one to make out. Acutely observed, economically written, brilliantly conveys the fissures in society and the characters' mounting desperation. Sophie used to do literary translations from the French, but lately she has drifted into indolence, sleeping in and scheduling lunch dates to give some shape to her days. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage—and a society—wrenching itself apart.Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. All of the houses had been built during the final third of the last century, and were of brick or brownstone. The horror that she might have contracted rabies spreads through her like the disease itself, and yet she refuses to go to the hospital for the standard regimen of preventive shots. The story is interesting and cohesive, the characters feel recognisable and real, the writing is masterful. Most front parlor windows were covered with white shutters. Her novel,“‎How pleasant to read uncompromised by purpose.”,“He smiled and bent forward, a hand on each knee, his truculence gleaming through his smile like a stone under water.”,Discussion - Week Two - Desperate Characters - Chapter Nine - Thirteen,Questions, Resources, and General Banter - Desperate Characters,Schedule for Discussions - Desperate Characters,Author and Bookstore Owner Emma Straub Returns with 'All Adults Here'. She spends the weekend in fear, avoiding the possibility that she could have rabies. Here is my unsophisticated reaction to this sophisticated novel.This is the type of small novel that critics and other novelists love. I found a list of “must read” modern classics a while back, and “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox, was on it with glowing reviews. I found a list of “must read” modern classics a while back, and “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox, was on it with glowing reviews. Rereading Paula Fox’s “Desperate Characters” By Alexandra Schwart z. The best part about this book was that it was short.My third re-read in ten years. After I learned that the writer Paula Fox had,The action, such that it is, takes place as a series of episodes over a winter weekend in the lives of the Bentwoods, a childless married couple of forty who live in a handsomely refurbished town house in a Brooklyn neighborhood that’s still part slum. It takes cash.”.What Otto loves is order, a sense of things being put in their right, and rightful, places.

Another story of the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie and of their petty concerns.

I found a list of “must read” modern classics a while back, and “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox, was on it with glowing reviews. Very fine novel.

You won’t read this novel … At the book’s emotional climax, Sophie, alone in her bedroom, has a revelation: “,“What happens to the people in them when the houses are bought?