Big City Book Club - Discussing 'Desperate Characters' With Paula Fox - NYTimes.com Ginia Bellafante will be responding to readers through 9:30 p.m. And to kick off the conversation, below is a back-and-forth between Ms. Bellafante and Ms. Fox herself. Ginia Bellafante: First and foremost, Paula, on behalf of the club's members I want to extend a very enthusiastic thank you to you for participating in this discussion of "Desperate Characters," a novel the critic Irving Howe compared to "Billy Budd" and "The Great Gatsby." Published in 1970, it examines the midlife marriage of Otto and Sophie Brentwood, a Brooklyn couple, for whom, suffice it to say, the center is definitely not holding. We bear witness to the emotional estrangement they experience with each other, and the alienation they so obviously feel in regard to the world the 1960s have wrought. Sophie is only 40, but her currency somehow has long ago vanished. Her existence is threatened by a feral cat. Otto and Sophie are wedded to their flimsy (literally) refinements - linen napkins, poached eggs in black butter - while the world, which is to say New York, is disintegrating. It's the late 1960s, and in front of proper Brooklyn brownstones, people are vomiting and defecating and the renovators and restorers are hosing things down as if applying Clearasil to a skin cancer. But you don't barrage the reader with these disruptions of civility. This isn't "Taxi Driver." These moments are used sparingly; they happen for the most part at the periphery. The effect is a heightened sense of anxiety and dread. It's incredibly hard not to feel jumpy reading this book. I wanted to pour myself a drink on nearly every third page. Part of the tension comes, of course, from hindsight. We know what's coming for the city: more crime, worse crime, poverty, crack, AIDS and so on. But surely this was a novel that was pretty enervating to read in 1970. You were living in Brooklyn at the time - isn't that right? - and so one is left to wonder: Was it any fun? You render the sense of ominousness with such force I'm assuming it was something that you must have felt viscerally. Did you think of leaving? Where exactly did you live at the time, and by the way where, precisely, are the Brentwoods living? I assumed it was Brooklyn Heights, but they cross Atlantic Avenue to go to the party at the Holsteins, who live in the Heights; so they live in Cobble Hill? "Desperate Characters" is, to my mind, a very political novel and I wondered if you'd talk about the extent to which you think of it the same way. It hardly comes at the reader with an overt agenda. But at the same time it renders an entirely damning portrait of a certain type, one whose primary orientation toward social decay is aesthetic displeasure rather than civic concern. What the decrepitude in Queens ignites in the Brentwoods is a wish for an alternate route to their Long Island weekend house, one that is less ugly. I love the vignettes of food in the book because they're so devastating, so evocative of that sense of moral and cultural superiority that foodies have, simply because they like to eat well. Of course we're in the end times now of that particular ideology, especially in Brooklyn, the artisanal-food-is-virtuous capital of the world. Does that disgust you? Amuse you? Merely make you say, "I told you so"? What are your prevailing thoughts on what the borough has become? Paula Fox: When I started writing "Desperate Characters," I had been living in Brooklyn for about three years. We moved from Manhattan, from Central Park West. At the time, Brooklyn was unfamiliar, not ominous. My son Gabe and I had come out and we looked at this house to rent - three floors in Boerum Hill, on Dean Street between Hoyt and Bond. We paid around $320. We could swing that kind of rental in those days. Only the basement floor was occupied, by a young couple, so we felt like we had the whole house for ourselves. There was space for Gabe, and Adam, my other son, to have their own rooms, and they were relieved to not have to share anymore. Was it fun? I was in my early 40s when the book was published. I didn't think about fun at the time. But we didn't think of moving. I loved the freedom of living in a house and being able to go up and down stairs. Writers often use their own environments as background against which they place their stories, like silhouettes before a screen. So, if we hadn't moved to Brooklyn, "Desperate Characters" wouldn't have been the same, but the story would have been very similar. A story, a book, draws on everything a writer knows. Even if I hadn't set it in Boerum Hill, it would have had a married couple struggling with the presence of people less lucky than they were. If there was a political aspect to the story of the Brentwoods, I wasn't aware of it as "political." You mentioned the route the family takes to Long Island. They do go through this ugly area of Queens, but they also pass mansions, much larger than their country home. I believe we're always struggling to maintain what we have or attain what others have. We're all under siege in one way or another. When we moved to Brooklyn, I witnessed an accident: A Puerto Rican boy had been riding in the back of a glass truck and a piece of glass fell on him and killed him. I went to the funeral. I thought about how progress takes victims, always. The glass was being put into a middle-class house. Privilege unconsciously causes the harm of others. You also asked about the role of food in the book. There have been times in my life when I've not had enough food, when I was willing to eat a piece of bread with nothing on it. And so I do think some food has a kind of political meaning. It says: look how wonderfully we eat, and how powerful we are. The Brentwoods live elaborate lives and eat elaborate food. In the novel, I paid special attention to food, especially dinner, because I realized how strongly symbolic it is. Brooklyn was a last resort back then. The only writer there was L. J. Davis. After I had written a review of his book, we met in the Community Bookstore, which still survives on Court Street. Later, Jonathan Lethem was there. Boerum Hill became very fashionable after we left for Cobble Hill, which has become very fashionable, too. Martin Amis lives there now.