Introduction by Andrea Barrett
Imagine the characters of a Greek tragedy—one that strictly obeys the Aristotelian unities of time and place—transposed to a short novel set in New York City in the early 1970s. Imagine they brilliantly illuminate that place and time, even while apparently focused on their persistent grievances, their needs for revenge, their contradictory yearnings for chaos and order, and their struggles for identity. Imagine, then, that their creator is gifted with absolute insight into each of them, male and female, old and young; that she possesses wit as well as the fiercest intelligence; that she has a deadly good ear and a prose style as sharp and precise as the bit of a drill.
Imagine all this, if you can—and still, you won’t have grasped this astringent, moving novel. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I am inspired by its rigorous intelligence, its elegant structure, its economy, and its passion.
The Widow’s Children was first published in 1976. By then, Paula Fox, who was born in 1923, had already written nearly a dozen well-received novels for children (the best-known of these, The Slave Dancer, won the 1974 Newbery Medal) and three excellent novels for adults. We ought to be as familiar with these as we are with the similarly brilliant works of Fox’s contemporaries Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Flannery O’Connor. Yet somehow they have not yet entered the canon in the same way.
Desperate Characters, Fox’s best novel before The Widow’s Children, was published in 1970; after a film based on it was made, a paperback edition enjoyed a brief popular life but soon went out of print. Reissued in 1980, it later went out of print again: it’s finally available now, after more than a decade. How did we lose track of it? Irving Howe, in his afterword to the 1980 reissue, placed Desperate Characters squarely within “a major American tradition, the line of the short novel exemplified by Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day”: a tradition in which “everything—action, form, language—is fiercely compressed, and often enough, dark-grained as well.”
Useful words, which apply not only to Desperate Characters but also to The Widow’s Children. A little over two hundred pages long, it is beautifully, ruthlessly compact, dependent on an absolute precision about character, emotion, and those violent familial bonds that Willa Cather, writing in praise of Katherine Mansfield, once described as
secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
I don’t invoke those names casually—Fox shares Cather’s elegant lucidity and Mansfield’s uncanny insight into the subterranean stream of human relationships, while having her own ferocious bite.
Despite its abundant riches, and Fox’s long and successful track record, The Widow’s Children evoked bewilderment as well as praise when it was first published. A few reviewers were grouchy—one called it “a strange, bilious novel about a violent family gathering”—while others, admiring, were still baffled by “the extraordinary difficulty one encounters in trying to describe it…. [A]djectives, plot summaries, and character analyses leave out almost everything that is singular about The Widow’s Children.” The fates have been unkind to it; reissued once before, in 1986, it has been out of print since 1990 and remains obdurately resistant to dissection.
This strikes me as one sure sign of its enduring brilliance—like a poem, it cannot be anatomized in any terms other than its own. Every line, every word, is there for a reason—yet it lives and breathes, it has not succumbed to the airlessness of perfection. Powerful, upsetting, it is also peculiarly exhilarating in its formal beauties and in its insights—and is never, ever depressing. In an interview, Fox once remarked:
People are always saying that my work is “depressing.” But what does that mean?…I’m so used to having the word “depressing” tied to me I feel like a dog accustomed to the tin can around its neck. The charge can still make me angry, not because of how it might reflect on my work, but because of what it tells me about reading in this country. Is Anna Karenina depressing? Is Madame Bovary? “Depressing,” when applied to a literary work, is so narrow, so confining, so impoverished and impoverishing. This yearning for the proverbial “happy ending” is little more than a desire for oblivion.
You will find no oblivion here. Nor will you find what the narrator of Fox’s fine 1990 novel, The God of Nightmares, scorns as “importunate and bullying optimism, and the hardened heart which was its consequence.” Instead you’ll find the most bracing clarity.
The Widow’s Children is built, unusually, from seven chapters of unequal length, laconically titled “Drinks,” “Corridor,” “Restaurant,” “The Messenger,” “The Brothers,” “Clara,” and “The Funeral.” Five characters form the cast: Laura Maldonada Clapper, a fifty-five-year-old faded beauty, twice-married, daughter of the impoverished widow, Alma; Laura’s feckless, hard-drinking husband, Desmond; her timid, self-loathing daughter Clara; her brother Carlos, openly gay and a failed music critic; and her old friend, a squelched book editor named Peter Rice.
The arc of their actions is simple, almost trivial. Alma, shuffled off to a nursing home and neglected, has died on the day before Laura and Desmond are scheduled to leave for a trip to Africa. Laura is notified of the death by phone, but conceals the information from everyone. That evening, Clara, Carlos, and Peter join Laura and Desmond for an uneasy bon voyage: the novel opens in the hotel room where they meet, and explores with Proustian intensity, over the course of some eighty pages, the characters’ interactions within that confined space. Later they inch down a corridor, move through the bleak rainy streets, and settle into a garish restaurant, where their conversation reflects only the most distorted surface of their underlying passions and secrets. Without warning, everything comes to a head in a huge messy outburst of Laura’s.
After the characters separate, “The Messenger” (an important character in many Greek plays), enters. In this case he’s played by Peter, who’s been charged to carry the news of Alma’s death to Carlos (whom Laura avoided telling all evening) and to their brother Eugenio (who has been absent). Peter has also been commanded not to tell Clara this vital news. In a swirl of accusations and recriminations, thoughtless actions and sleep-deprived conversations, the final movement unrolls swiftly through a long dark night of the soul and into Alma’s funeral the following day.
That’s it, on the surface. But this is like saying that What Maisie Knew—to the spirit of which this novel bears some kinship—is about a child caught in a messy divorce. What’s important is what’s going on underneath: what the characters don’t say, to each other or to themselves; what they are thinking, what they feel; the long secret history of their uprooted, once-Spanish, family. The intensity of those subterranean movements is part of what has kept the novel from dating. Even now it feels startlingly contemporary in its acceptance of multiple forms of sexuality, its sharp focus on the nature of identity and the costs of exile, and its grasp of what we now label “dysfunctional families.”
There is real, and unexpected, suspense in Fox’s subtle working-out of the shifting configurations of these family relationships. Equally compelling is the pattern of rootlessness established by Alma’s displacement from Spain to Cuba, and then to New York, which resonates through three generations. As the characters struggle with the paralysis induced by resentment and old grudges, the memory of poverty and the pain of exile, they, and we, are caught in a storm that’s lightened at the most surprising moments by shafts of humor and by the characters’ fierce, amazing bursts of self-awareness.
This is especially true in the novel’s long first chapter, which allows us to experience the hour in that hotel room much as the characters do. We share with them, because we’re meant to, a sense of feeling trapped, itchy, uneasy; we feel the slowness with which time passes during their endless arguments. We experience—as we might in our own lives, although at a more muted level—what Clara thinks of as the horrible “discrepancy between surface talk and inner preoccupation.” Yet even as we’re privy to the grinding, repetitive nature of these characters’ arguments (this is the part that’s like life), we also plunge into the limpid, lonely purity of their thoughts. (This is what makes it art.) One by one, we come to know them.
First, Laura. Receiving the news that her mother has died, she immediately conceals this from her husband, and thinks about hiding it from everyone else as well:
Her mind had been empty of thought; she had known only that something implacable had taken hold of her. And she had felt a half-crazed pleasure and an impulse to shout that she knew and possessed this thing that no one else knew, this consequential fact, hard and real among the soft accumulations of meaningless events of which their planned trip to Africa was one other, to be experienced only through its arrangements, itinerary, packing, acquisition of medicines for intestinal upsets, books to read, clock, soap, passports, this husk of action surrounding the motionless center of their existence together.
Then Carlos, with his urbane matters and seemingly imperturbable surface, unaware that his mother is already dead:
Waking at a late hour of a Sunday morning, knowing he ought to visit his mother at the home, knowing that he would not, aware of the noxious stink of his apartment, of stale food and dust and unwashed sheets, Carlos would fold his hands behind his head and lie there, tears running down his cheeks, thinking of his used-up life, of lovers dead or gone, of investments made unwisely, of his violent sister who might telephone him at any minute and, with her elaborate killer’s manners, in her beautiful deep voice, make some outrageous demand upon him, making clear she knew not only the open secrets of his life but the hidden ones, knew about his real shiftlessness, his increasing boredom with sexual pursuit, his unappeased sexual longing, his terror of age. “I’m becoming an old sow,” he would whisper to himself, trying to keep at bay the thought of his mother waiting in the disinfectant, linoleum-smelling stillness of the old people’s home for him to come and see her.
Drifting between them is Desmond, already deeply drunk; thinking inappropriately and yet believably about a salesgirl with “a flat rear end, buttocks hanging down like frying pans.” And buttressing that trio, linked by fear and timidity, are Clara (abandoned by Laura at birth, and raised by Alma) and Peter, ironic and reserved.
Of Peter we have, in this brilliantly orchestrated first chapter, thoughts less revealing of his inner state—perhaps because, in one of the novel’s great surprises, the last three chapters are turned over almost entirely to him. In the fourth, central chapter—very short, and functioning as a hinge between the two other groups of three—the news of Alma’s death is passed from Laura to Desmond to Peter, who is asked to bring that message to the remainder of the family. Only with this switch in perspective do we see the Maldonadas fully, from the outside: their effects on others, all they have caused, all their sufferings. Only here do we learn the full, heartbreaking history of Alma, the secrets of Carlos and Eugenio, and the devastating effects of this family on Peter. Although we couldn’t have suspected it at first, Peter is far from a minor character. Not the book’s hero—the book has no heroes—but a consciousness central to our vision.
Until that crucial fourth chapter, everyone has been reacting to Laura, fearing Laura, hiding from her, attempting to please her. Her mind is closed to us after the opening pages; we know her only through what she says and how the others respond to her until, in the final movement of “Restaurant,” she reacts with an outburst of emotion to an innocent comment of Clara’s. Leaping from the table, hurling herself into the streets, she is frantic. In those moments we get our sole crucial glimpse of the interior life of the woman who has, for Peter, represented all that is chaotic and free and wild, all the life he has denied himself:
That girl! That girl with her open mouth, her idiot fearfulness—and Peter Rice, an insect husk, the goddamned vampire sucking her life away, that bloodless Christian sewing machine with his intolerable daintiness—what had she to do with such creatures, what did she have to do with thick-witted, thick-ankled old Desmond and his infant thieving of liquor, or with debauched Carlos—but at the thought of Carlos, Laura began to cry. She didn’t understand anything! The unyielding mystery of her impulses was punishment enough for whatever she had done—she thought she had put them to sleep so long ago, that they had withered away just as she was withering away, but they were awake, the old beasts of her life, so merciless, so cruel…. An enormous grief rose in her. The knowledge of the death of her mother flooded her bloodstream, entered her bowels, her marrow.
It is this woman—a woman who thinks of him as a “bloodless Christian sewing machine”—to whom Peter has devoted his life. For thirty years he has held, against all competing evidence, his first vision of her:
He had not known Carlos well, then, and he had never known a Spaniard before. Here were Spaniards. Laura in the light, clear air like a dark root, slender then, balancing her peony head, sitting quietly in a chintz-covered chair, the sunlight falling upon the rug at her feet and on the legs of the white rattan table on the edge of which her cigarette burned.
There’s nothing I can add to a passage like that; truly, this novel can’t be described. All I can do is offer tidbits, and suggest that its narrative voice and structure, so unusual at first glance, exist in part to make possible the bloody glimpses inside the characters. It’s as if they’ve been trepanned, or have trepanned themselves. It’s as if, through the holes bored into this contentious group, Fox has illuminated the stony path stretching between their (our) adult selves and the snow-strewn childhood morning Peter remembers, when he woke and “felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.”
I haven’t talked about the subtle, brilliant way that Alma’s history and Clara’s childhood are revealed in fragments, through the conversations and memories of the other characters. Neither have I done justice to the mysterious Eugenio, as complicated and touching as all the others, though he enters so late. I should talk about Fox’s gorgeous prose, her ability to orchestrate tempo, and her mastery (she has, among contemporary writers, no equals in this) of point-of-view. I’ve scanted the extraordinary rightness of Fox’s imagery, which recurs and rebounds in troubling patterns, as in a dream or a nightmare: the way, for example, that the violent Maldonadas view people in terms of animals—cats, tigers, opossums, porcupines—while Peter, and only Peter, sees them in terms of flowers and vegetables: Laura, above all, with her “peony head.”
There is, too, the skill with which Fox reveals the corrosive sadness of late middle age, the deceptions and self-deceptions of love, the long secret paths by which, as Laura notes, we change: “We all do, we grow disfigured and hideous like my poor mother’s black shoes.” And there is so much else, so much else—but to talk about it all is to quote, in the end, every line in the book. I’ve pulled out of context fragments I find singularly piercing, but all that surrounds those lines is equally piercing. The novel is itself, wholly itself; there is no way to comprehend it except to read it.