Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
“Who listens?”
An irresistibly compact and annoying question, posed by George, the title character of the book you hold in your hands. That question is like a pinprick of light in a dark surface: the only entrance you’ll be offered. Better crawl through and see what’s there.
First, an introduction that shouldn’t be necessary. How good does an author or a book have to be to be reintroduced? To be pulled back into print by the devotional efforts of editors and writers (all of us only readers, really, when it comes down to it), pulled back against the unceasing tide of new titles, how good? I’m here to tell you how very, very good Paula Fox is.
It’s hard to do more, though, when writing critically about an artifact as dense, distinctive, and self-contained as Poor George, than be a gnat buzzing at the outer surface of a lozenge. The lozenge unmistakably needs to be swallowed and absorbed, which the gnat can’t do. If it is swallowed and absorbed, though—as I’ve just done three times in a short span of months—an essence seeps through the body, then lives on the surface like a new set of nerves.
What I mean to say, as I circle my desk, trying to decide what to tell you about Poor George, is that I’m wearing the book as a skin. This skin is particularly tender to social loathing and self-loathing, to morbid confession disguised as chitchat, and, above all, to postures of self-willed innocence in human relations. Paula Fox writes with an almost crushing accuracy about these things, here and elsewhere. And if this isn’t always a skin I’m completely eager to wear, perhaps I’m closer to understanding how a writer as great as Fox can linger for so long at a proximity from the acclaim and readership she plainly deserves. There’s no justice, but maybe a certain inevitability, that a master of elucidating what’s denied everywhere under the surface of human moments—and of measuring the texture of that insistent, howling denial—should find her own work denied, kept at bay at the edge of vision.
So who’s this George who wants to know who listens? He’s a schoolteacher, a husband, a Samaritan—a nobody, if you’ll forgive me. George might be trying and failing to father a child, and he might also have an Achilles’ heel in the area of unexamined bisexual longing—likely there are a few longings, his own and those of his loved ones, at which he’d be well advised to take a closer look. But really, here’s the key thing about poor George: don’t tell the guy, but he’s made of gorgeous sentences. Sentences that are gorgeous because of how closely they listen. A vibrant, writerly intelligence shines everywhere through the bars of George’s prison—in fact, the bars themselves might be said to be made up of the compressed and blinding sunlight of literary sensibility. Try for instance:
He had to convince Ernest of—of what? Convince him that much had gone before, that he had not sprung from sticks and stones to find himself on a dead planet thinly covered with sidewalks leading nowhere.
Or:
When she is silent she is very silent, George thought, and found himself interested in her. She vomits speech, then retreats, like some mud dweller.
Or:
In that empty landscape where only the two trees and the toppling uprights of the shed gave shelter, they had stumbled towards each other, falling into the prickly dust in a thick, graceless embrace, their faces straining against each other’s shoulders like two swimmers racing desperately for opposite shores.
The question is, who listens to sentences like these? Not George. George only teeters at knowingness, then retreats. Not only is he not as smart as the sentences that form him and the bars of his prison but, disconcertingly, crucially, he’s not as smart as the sentences he’s given to speak. Fox grants him the acid wit accorded the rest of her characters, but his tongue knows more than he does, as he completes his numbed and persevering daily route through himself and his life. George watches his wife cry:
One large, luminous tear was on her cheek; dazzled by its brilliance, he watched it run under her chin and disappear. Perhaps, he thought, he was crazy, The weight…the weight of everything was stupefying.
I’d venture that the weight George staggers under is the weight of how much everything is forced to mean when you’ve tried to deny the meaning of what actually is.
Now the buzzing gnat part of me reminds me to inform you that Poor George is funny. Not “also funny” but essentially, vitally funny, in the perverse vein of Kafka and Flannery O’Connor. There are Diane Arbus photographs in prose here, as Fox offers her vision of bodies as poorly operated puppets:
Four young men walked by. They were disparate in physical type but each face bore the same sullen inward look. They were thin, shaggy, book-carrying, slovenly, and their arms and legs appeared to have been glued on with little consideration for symmetry. “I have seen the future and it walks,” George said. At that moment one of them turned and stared at Lila, at her prominent breasts. There was no expression on his face at all.
Here’s another:
The woman, red-haired and massive, was shaking a small boy whose head was encased in a transparent bubblelike helmet. On it was printed “Space Scout.” From inside, the boy gazed out coolly like a fish. A blind Negro, his white cane poking out in front of him, hesitated and stopped. The woman shot a furious glance in his direction, then banged on the helmet with her knuckles.
Another gnat instinct I won’t resist is to compare Poor George to Fox’s other masterpiece, Desperate Characters, if only to draw in those familiar with the book that deservedly kicked off the revival you’re taking part in, lovely, faithful reader, by picking up this one. Poor George was Fox’s first published novel, Desperate Characters her second. I felt echoes: Ernest in Poor George is a kind of conflation of Desperate Characters’ biting stray cat and its unglimpsed pillagers who desecrate the country house, while Walling in Poor George mimics Charlie Russel in Characters as a hipster-irritant-seer to contrast the uptight male lead. What Poor George does that Desperate Characters refrains from doing is explode. It feels like Fox tried it once each way in her first two novels: tightening the screws in Characters and letting the wheels fall off in Poor George. The result is that Poor George is somehow both more disorienting and more relieving—in the strict sense of tension released.
To my eye, that messy and funny explosion into overt drama in its last sixty pages gently aligns Poor George with more or less contemporary novels by Thomas Berger, Charles Webb, L. J. Davis, and Bruce Jay Friedman. And, by reminding me of all of them at once, it made me understand for the first time how sixties literary critics might have been excused reaching for a label to describe a certain flavor in American fiction of the time—though the one they found, “Black Humor,” was as inadequate as any label any writer was ever compelled to reject. I’m not even sure why I bring it up, except that Poor George is of its time, richly so. And that I miss a certain homely-doom vibe, which seemingly used to be more casually deployable, as in those novelists I’ve listed, and in films like Robert Altman’s Three Women and Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, and in Randy Newman’s songs from the same period.
Who reads? I’d never heard of Paula Fox, except as an author of children’s books, before an editor pushed Desperate Characters at me three years ago. Three years later she’s a favorite, and an influence on my own work. Since you might be grappling for context now the way I was then, I’d be ungenerous not to repeat some of what Jonathan Franzen and Andrea Barrett establish in their elegant introductions to Desperate Characters and The Widow’s Children (Fox’s fourth novel, republished in 1999): these books were critically acclaimed in their time, really. Compared by critics then and now to Chekhov and Melville and Muriel Spark and Nathanael West and Batman and Robin, really, and rightly. She’s good, she’s good, she’s more than good. If it’s amazing what can be recognized and forgotten (or denied), it’s also amazing what can be restored, and Paula Fox is, I think, becoming the most encouraging revival from completely-out-of-print status since Dawn Powell. (Buzz, gnat, buzz.) What I mean to say is, for yourself, not for me or Paula or George, read the book. Listen to it.