Desperate Characters is a hard, bitter, extreme little book that is somehow full of humanity. It has a brilliant narrative device: a cat bite that may or may not be rabid serves as a kind of tow line pulling us through the novel. I've seldom read a book with so much nastiness that manages never to disdain its characters. Extraordinary.--Garth Greenwell "The Millions"
Paula Fox's narrative feels singular, particularly in the way it captures, through effervescently intelligent dialogue, the tenuousness of intimate relationships.--Rose Courteau "New York Times"
[Desperate Characters]--tense, quick, prickling with suppressed panic--is very much of its time and has a lot to say to ours, too. If you've never read it, or if, like me, it's been a while since you did, now is an excellent moment to pick it up.--Alexandra Schwartz "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"
A perfect short novel...As in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared.--Andrea Barrett
Absorbing, elegant.--Charles Winecoff "Entertainment Weekly"
Packed with lucid insights.--Isabella Biedenharn "Entertainment Weekly"
The first time I read Desperate Characters...I fell in love with it.--Jonathan Franzen
Fox dissects a marriage and a social class with the sharpest of knives, cannily undermining not only one couple's false pieties and deceptive comforts but our own as well.--Marisa Silver
This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream.--Frederick Busch