Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a couple of forty-ish middle-class New Yorkers, living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn full of nice stuff, eating nice food and generally having a nice life, albeit a bit removed from what coarse earthy proletarian types like you and me might call the "real" world.
Reality intervenes, though, as it always does - Charlie, Otto's partner in his legal practice, wants to dissolve their partnership and this (hardly surprisingly) has made their personal relationship a bit frosty, especially with all the inevitable jockeying for who gets to keep which lucrative clients.
Around the same time, Sophie is feeding one of the various stray cats that roam the local area and is unexpectedly bitten quite severely on the hand. Rather than do what normal non-neurotic people do and go to a doctor for treatment and perhaps a rabies jab, Sophie instead binds the wound up and does her best to ignore the swelling and constant ache.
So we can see a theme developing here: the Bentwoods' nice cosy middle-class life being invaded and disrupted by external "real-world" factors. Sure enough more weird shit starts to happen: a wordless late-night phone call, which turns out to be from Charlie (and which prompts a slightly bizarre late-night meet-up between him and Sophie while Otto is asleep), a rock being thrown through a window while the Bentwoods are at a party at a friend's house, a tense episode where a black man calls at the apartment and requests the use of the Bentwood's phone and eventually some money, and finally their discovery on visiting their holiday house on Long Island that it's been burgled and vandalised and the perpetrators have taken a nice big shit on the lounge carpet.
Eventually all of this starts to take its toll on the Bentwoods' equilibrium: Sophie has a shouty exchange with her friend Tanya who's phoned up for a gossip about her (Tanya's) latest love affair, and Otto angrily throws a bottle of ink at the wall after Charlie phones him up wanting to sort out some details of the dissolution of their business partnership.
So what are we to make of this? Has the disruption to their hermetically-sealed lives allowed the Bentwoods to get back in touch with their actual feelings? Or have they just been pushed over the edge and GONE MENTAL (and possibly, in Sophie's case, RABID)?
You won't get a definitive answer on any of that from me, as it happens, as this is one of those books I felt must have some significance that just eluded my grasp. It'd probably be too harsh to describe it as just a book about annoying privileged people being privileged and annoying, but I couldn't help but admit to a pang of sympathy with whoever it was took a colossal dump on their living room carpet. To put it another way, it's a very skilled writer who can make a novel work that contains pretty much no likeable characters whatsoever, and for all that Paula Fox clearly was (she died in 2017) a very skilled writer I'm not sure she quite manages it here. It's very clever and perceptive in its own way, though, and I can see the sense of the comparisons to John Updike; I guess I just found it a bit cold and uninvolving.
One of the things the Guardian obituary linked above doesn't mention, incidentally, is that via her daughter Linda, whom she gave up for adoption, Paula Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother. Moreover, if certain lurid but plausible showbiz rumours are true, Marlon Brando may have been Courtney Love's grandfather.
Desperate Characters was filmed in 1971, starring Shirley Maclaine as Sophie and Kenneth Mars as Otto. This seems odd to me as the only two things I've seen Kenneth Mars in were the two Mel Brooks films The Producers and Young Frankenstein, in both of which he does a scenery-chewing turn as a comical nutter. I'm sure he was an actor of range and subtlety if the part demanded it, though. My Flamingo paperback copy contains an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, whose advocacy of Fox and of Desperate Characters in particular was instrumental in its being reissued after many years out of print. This provides another instance of a book on this list carrying a foreword by another author who appears on the same list; a non-exhaustive list of the handful of previous instances appears at the end of the 2018 review of True Grit.
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