Paula Fox's Desperate Characters feels to me less like a novel than a short story, or perhaps a set of short stories sutured together. It's comprised of a series of incidents that concern a married couple and like many fictions in the short story genre, resists closure or resolution. Though it's a miniature of a novel, it's still a gem.
The principal characters, Otto and Sophie, come to the end of the story just about where they started -- not miserable but not happy either. They are immigrants to an incompletely gentrified, downtown Brooklyn neighborhood. Their house -- all pocket doors, cedar floors, highly polished Victorian furniture even a Meissen cat dish -- as well as the houses of their neighbors are vulnerable to violation. Otto and Sophie, and their friends, are attacked by the sort of intrusions that are familiar from horror films -- the bite of a stray cat, a threatening phone call, a stone thrown through a window, unwanted visitors, vicious inexplicable vandalism, mysterious goings-on in the house next door. These attacks on the home are intermittent but unending; in fact, the last image in the book is of a self-inflicted wound -- an interior wall splotched and stained by the black ink of a thrown inkwell. Stasis, not progress.
Should I have been surprised that the Brooklyn novels that I have now read are so concerned with the acquisition, improvement, integrity, and preservation of the homestead?
To tell truth, I have been a bit startled -- but I should not have been. Brooklyn has always been the most mutable and fluid of cities. Outsiders -- Irish, Italians and Jews in my part of Flatbush, as well as southern Blacks searching for the warmth of other suns, West Indians, Russians, Hispanics from central and south Americas, Asians of all varieties, and nowadays midWesterners -- arrive and alter the neighborhood. For the worse, according to the prior inhabitants, and for the better, according to the new arrivals. It's a repeated and perpetual dance -- and certainly one that was a feature of my own family history.
My immigrant grandparents never had the resources even to imagine the purchase of a home. They were renters of a cold-water sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg. Nor had they owned property in the old country, where they were even poorer. I imagine that when my parents purchased the house in which I was raised (in 1936, for $4500) they were the first in my ancestry dating back to the spear and atalatl eons ever to own a piece of real estate.
Re-reading these Brooklyn books has reminded me how important that home on East 9 Street in heart of Flatbush was to my parents. And why my father, in his last years, solitary, crippled by arthritis, but intransigent refused to leave it though it would have been much more sensible and convenient to live elsewhere. He was determined to die in his own precious home, and he did so.
Here's a picture of 539 East 9 Street, a big old undistinguished Victorian, taken sometime around the 1939, the year of my birth. The second and third stories were rented; we lived on the ground floor. The house, long since demolished, lives on in my memory.
Especially in my nightmares, where at least once a month, I defend myself against the savage bows and arrows, the cavalry rifles, and wild dogs that attack the property. And wake up in a sweaty terror.
Comments