At first glance, Paula Fox's return from the dustbin of publishing history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as 'brilliant' by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it 'reserved and beautifully realised'. Six years later Karl Miller found The Widow's Children 'a compelling and satisfying book'. All those endorsements, however, didn't keep her novels from going out of print at the end of the decade (they were reprinted in the 1980s, but went out of print again). Then Jonathan Franzen, at the time (1991) something of a desperate character himself, came across that novel on a shelf at Yaddo, the writer's colony in upstate New York. When Franzen later wrote an impassioned plea for the 'social novel' in Harper's, he held up Desperate Characters as an example of what novelists ought to be doing.[*]

LRB 12 December 2002 | PDF Download