These words from
The Washington Post's Ron Charles drew me to
The Coffins of Little Hope:
The Coffins of Little Hope is like an Edward Gorey cartoon stitched in pastel needlepoint. Its creepiness scurries along the edges of these heartwarming pages like some furry creature you keep convincing yourself you didn't see.
You're in, right? You want to know more? I bought the book, I got in and I stayed, from the very first line:
I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn't quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.
.... to the last:
You were young only minutes ago.
Reading the pages in between was like watching the lights of a carnival go on—the hurly burly commotion of color, the hyperkinetic blink of possibility, the flavorful oddness of a
sui generis cast of characters. There's Essie Myles, an 83-year-old obituary writer for the local, small-town paper. There's the possible kidnapping of a possible daughter (yes, that's right, we never know for absolute certain if the kidnapped daughter is a scam or a true loss). There's the final installment of a famed young adult book that's being printed by Essie's press. Parts of that book get leaked (or
are those parts the real book?) Gentle weirdnesses come and go (but have they left forever?). These small-town people face all kinds of trouble (or they make it up), and Schaeffert can't say no to the sweet tangent.
It's a wild bob and weave. It's profoundly and preposterously well-imagined. There are lines here, plenty of them, that most writers would give their polished eye tooth to lay a claim to. Taken together,
Coffins is a delight—a book that you cannot wrangle with. Just let it happen to you. Stumble off, dazed.
I read four books while I was away (beyond all that I read about Berlin). I reported on the first—
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black's crisp and smart debut short story collection—
here. I'll be reporting on the others (
The Paris Wife (hmmmmm) and
The Coffins of Little Hope (a marvel!)) in days to come.
But this very early morning, I'm reflecting on the scouring brilliance of Paula Fox's
Desperate Characters. It's a book I'd always meant to read, an author whose story I have followed. That doesn't mean that I was prepared for the hard, bright smack of Fox's sentences, the relentless disintegration of a domestic arrangement that may or may not hold. We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for helping to bring
Desperate Characters back into print and wide circulation. We have, in the Norton edition, his essay that suggests that the book is, "on a first reading," "a novel of suspense."
As the novel opens, Sophie Brentwood is bitten by a stray cat; Sophie's hand swells. Sophie should have the hand checked, but she is afraid. She can imagine dire consequences—rabies, even death—but other underlying fears persist and complicate. Three days will go by, and the wound will keep molting, oozing, disfiguring, haunting, and this is the running tension—this cat bite, this not knowing, this unwillingness to find out, this false hope that comforts lie elsewhere (in drink, in friendship, in secrets, in lashing out). Into this strange, unsettling frame Fox inserts the fractures of a marriage in naked near stasis. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are childless. Otto is abandoning a business partnership with a long-time friend, Charlie—bating him, hating him, feeling abandoned and abused by him. Brooklyn, finally, is scathing and scabrous and ill-equipped, in these late 1960s, to wrap this couple in a numbing sheen.
Sophie and Otto know too much. They see too much. They both despise excessively and love forlornly. Is this all that marriage is? All it offers? Is there refuge among the refuse? In whose arms can one trustingly take shelter?
Desperate Characters is a brutal book, a lacerating book, and if that makes it a hard book to read, it also makes it an impossible book to put down. I, for one, read the bulk of it while being jostled about during a long wait at the Berlin airport.
There are easy books, and there are hard books, and I will be honest: I prefer the latter. I want to be tested. I want to think. I want to study a book and ask, in awe, How in the world was this made?
Desperate Characters has me asking.
You had me with the quote about the typewriter :)
i like the last line.