I decided to take a little blogging break after Reading Ireland Month, but that break seems to have stretched to three weeks, which is the longest I have gone without blogging in the last 9 months! Desperate Characters soars above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War. Sophie and Otto Bentwood live in a Brooklyn brownstone, with an enviable middle-class life.
Otto is a lawyer, Sophie a translator although she does not work much and they have a beautiful home, cultured friends and a house in the country. Despite two miscarriages, they have no children and seem not to pine for the loss. One evening, Sophie is bitten on the hand whilst feeding a stray cat and this small, random happening is the catalyst for larger cracks to appear, both in their marriage and in their wider lives. Fox has a great ear for dialogue and an eye for the facades that we build up in our daily lives.
The tension builds throughout the novel, through a well-paced evasion of fact. Sophie does not want to go to the hospital, in case she has rabies, despite knowing that it would be the sensible thing to do. Her husband Otto is splitting from his partner in his law firm, despite knowing that they would be better off staying together.
Sophie and Otto help a strange man who comes to their door, but may, or may not have been conned, while the respite they normally find at their holiday home is shattered by mindless vandalism. Here is life in a microcosm β small, ominous things build until their relationship is at breaking point. Desperate Characters is a stylish read β although some aspects of the book have aged badly an undercurrent of racism persists β Fox deserves to be read as widely as her male counterparts from the time, such as Updike and Roth.
You never really know what you are going to get with a Peter Carey novel, other than to be sure that it will probably be good and My Life as a Fake is no exception.
