Paperback Jukebox—Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

In 1970 Paula Fox was concerned about two things happening in New York.  Wealthy people were moving from Manhattan to the boroughs, buying homes in marginal neighborhoods and endlessly defining and redefining the term “social conscience” at dinner parties.  At the same time, publishers and editors were viciously trimming away the messy excesses that had characterized much of the fiction of the 50s and, especially, 60s.  Writing was once again becoming “spare” and “minimal,” a trend that was heading we-all-know-where in just a couple of years. 

Fox presciently braids these two developments into a short, dark and claustrophobic narrative about what it means to be civilized.  On its surface, Desperate Characters is the portrait of a marriage, but beneath its surface lurks portraits of a city and a craft at a time of great social and economic change.

The word “gentrifier” may not have existed in 1970, but Sophie and Otto Brentwood are the reason such a term became necessary.  They live on a Brooklyn street lined with garbage, human waste and stray animals.  Otto is a lawyer who recently split with his long-time partner over disagreements about the representation of problematic clients.  Sophie, who the book’s point of view follows and favors, is a jaded academic who has begun to turn away from translation work.  Their house is flawless and suffocating, strangled by its own good taste.

The Brentwoods’ civilized lifestyle has its foundation in walls and limits.  They rely on structures – a house, a marriage, a type of language – and maintain clear distinctions between inside and out.  The enemy in this book is infection.  Sophie, however, is a complicated character.  She wavers between dread of the outside world and a persistent wish to be harmed.  It is implied that this complication is rooted in a perverted sense of generosity and that this is what leads her, in the novel’s opening scene, to feed a stray cat.  The animal expresses its gratitude by biting her.  The breaking of her skin begins the anecdotal action of a novel told almost entirely in vignettes.  As her fear of rabies builds, Sophie reexamines the structures on which she relies.  She prods them and finds flaws.  She contemplates old infections.  She picks at these weaknesses like a sore, both repelled and irresistibly drawn, terrified of pain she believes she deserves.  “If I am rabid,” she finally asserts with a good deal of relief, “I am equal to what is outside.”

There is a lot of food in the book.  People are constantly (and Fox is very pointed about the symbolic value of these actions) cooking, eating, deciding what to eat, and examining their own level of hunger.  The description of kitchens is one of the primary techniques with which Fox represents character.  In the middle of the book, Leon, an aging and cynical leftist, describes civilization in terms of cooking: “You take raw material and you transform it: that is civilization.”  The act of willingly taking something into one’s body, of infecting oneself with nutrition, must, in the paranoid atmosphere Fox creates, be done with great care and style.

The book begins with a dinner.  The Brentwoods sit down inside a small, dark dining room to nosh on a meal of chicken livers.  These livers are a very Foxian detail.  Smelly, palpable, they still (with their hints at pate) represent civilized sophistication.  It is a very high-brow meal and Otto is uninhibited in his dismissive talk of the world outside of the walls.  Much later in the book, the livers reappear.  The Brentwoods use the leftovers as bait to trap the cat so that it can be taken to the doctor, killed, and tested for rabies.  Using Leon’s phraseology, the “raw material” of the livers has been transformed.  They still represent civilization, but civilization is no longer a quiet meal.  It has become something much more ruthless.

In 1970, in New York City, Fox witnessed the beginnings of gentrification.  She watched as civilized “good taste” was used to bait, strangle and kill entire neighborhoods.  And then she wrote a book that is an artifact of this inevitably emerging taste.  The unchecked inclusiveness of the 60s was over.  Writers began to edit.  Soon, books like this would be embraced: books that built walls and careful structures, books lacking any arbitrary words, books in which every sentence can be marked as a turning point.

In this way the perfection of Desperate Characters is its own enemy.  Why choose civilization if it is as brutal as the world outside, but more false?  The book generates a great deal of rage and frustration against the significance of its own thoughts and meanings.  Its very precision points us toward a terrifying meaninglessness, a rabid world where thoughts such as these have no importance.

Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York.  He is currently working on revision of his novel, 'The Uses of Talent' and rocking with the band Workshop.  He lives in Polish Hill.

Paperback Jukebox—Earth’s Children by Jean Auel

I'm a sucker for a series. It doesn't even have to be a good series. Case in point: Earth’s Children, best known for its first installment, Clan of the Cave Bear. The novels, of which there are five to date, don’t exactly belong on a list of Great Books. They are melodramatic, contain long passages of uninterrupted description, and employ characters too perfect to be believable.  But at the same time, the story is so compelling, so meticulously researched, and so accessible for such an esoteric storyline that I find myself captivated.

Earth’s Children is historical fiction based in the brief time period when Neanderthals and modern Homo Sapiens co-existed. Nobody really knows how the Neanderthals died out or what sort of contact, if any, they had with our forbearers, but author Jean Auel creates an entire world based around the interaction between the two species (sub-species, if you want to be anthropologically correct). At the beginning of Clan of the Cave Bear, Auel orphans a 6-year-old Homo Sapiens waif and has her discovered by a small band of Neanderthals who take her in. Auel goes back and forth between the emotional struggles between the two types of people within pages upon pages of description that read like an anthropology textbook (hunting weapons, the preservation of meat, whole chapters on herbal medicines). Ayla, the heroine, is tall, blonde, curvaceous (she's played by Daryl Hanna in the hideous 1980s film adaptation) and brilliant. She invents everything from the sewing needle to the domestication of animals.

The first book is great for those who want to geek out over prehistory, but the author seems to have wanted a broader appeal with the rest of the series. Beginning in book two—cue the primordial saxophones—Ayla is about to get some. She finally meets a man of her own kind (6'4'' and muscle bound with ice blue eyes that are sooooo sensitive). Passages describing the construction of a hide shelter are back to back with phrases like “thrusting manhood” and “warm woman well.” It’s steamy enough to rival any dimestore romance novel, but researched enough to appear as a companion reader to a general anthropology class.

If this juxtaposition seems a bit unlikely, it’s fitting that Auel herself is an oddity in the literary world. Clan of the Cave Bear was not only her first book; it was the first piece of fiction she had ever written. She also began it at age 40, after her five children were grown.  Auel had been a housewife until her late 30s when she got an MBA.  Then, despite having no previous writing experience, she refused the job she was offered at a bank in order to write a short story about a prehistoric cave girl. The short story became a novel and the novel became a series. Of course, it helps the housewife-cum-literary-phenomenon is a card carrying genius (she’s a member of Mensa). Quite a helpful credential when one undertakes to describe dozens of prehistoric societies in accurate detail with no previous anthropological training.  The breadth of her research is mind-boggling, including three different methods of primitive boat construction—each depicted in such detail that you could conceivably go out and make your own watercraft. It does seem a bit forced, but it’s worth the loss of literary flow to wonder at the sheer volume of knowledge that Auel presents throughout the series.

I admit, I love it. This may have something to do with the fact that I was an anthropology major. Plus, I would wager that these are the sexiest books ever written for dorks. And who doesn’t like to read a little smut now and again?  But heaving bosoms aside, the story of the beginnings of civilization is so gripping, so thought-provoking that I devoured all five books in record time and scoured the web for news of a sixth (it’s coming!).  And I’m certainly not alone in my fascination.  Clan of the Cave Bear broke all records of fiction sales by selling several million copies of its hardback first edition, and the series continues to break records with each release. I find the idea of such an improbable storyline having mass commercial success as interesting as the books themselves. It seems that there are more dorks in the world than I imagined. 

Hallie Pritts is a Pennsylvania native who spends her days translating French and her nights rocking out in the Pittsburgh indie folk band, Boca Chica.