Paula Fox (1923–2017)

This was a powerful book describing a woman who tried to figure out life and live it on her own terms. She queried a huge group of people to find the meaning of life, and at the end, is still trying. She was extremely empathic and less bigoted than most people I've read about in 1939-1945. I would have preferred that she make just her own decisions in the end, but that is not who she was. I was also concerned about the great amount of drinking in the book and also how many who could not hold their liquor were dismissed. I did care about many of the characters and appreciated the description of communism in this country. Learning about the making of movies in Hollywood was also illuminating. and of course the treatment of people of color after world war ii was infuriating!… (more)

Ron DeSantis and those who are afraid to have white children traumatized by the slave trade will try to go back in time and and ban this, but it is a chilling tale deserving of its Newbery Medal awarded in 1974. While playing his fife in New Orleans in the 1840's, an impoverished thirteen year old boy, Jessie, is kidnapped and brought aboard an American slave ship, The Moonlight, and forced to play music to keep the captured African men, women, and children from Benin in motion. Most of the sailors hate their lives and the officers aboard the ship, and when all hands but Jessie and Ras, an African boy his age, drown in a shipwreck, the reader will feel little remorse. The book is based upon actual historical documents and is probably best suited for 6th graders and up, and should be incorporated into a school lesson.… (more)

"...she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as at struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sunk its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified...."

Otto and Sophie Bentwood live in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Otto is in the process of dissolving his longtime law partnership with Charlie Russell. Cracks are beginning to show in Otto and Sophie's marriage, and outside, all around are signs that civil society is falling apart.

One evening after dinner, Sophie gives a saucer of milk to a stray cat on their back porch. As she bends down to pet the cat, it viciously bites her. Over the next three days she ponders, Will she get rabies and die? or Will nothing happen? Sophies ambivalence was said, by Jonathan Franzen in the forward to the edition I read, to resemble Hamlet, a "morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means...." Over the three days as Sophie tries to decide what to do, then waits test results, the book builds enormous suspense. I found the writing to be exquisite, and I underlined many phrases. (I will probably put a few at the end of this review). I will definitely be searching for more to read by Paula Fox

4 1/2 stars

Incidentally David Foster Wallace called this book "A towering landmark of postwar Realism." And Jonathan Franzen says this book and Fox are better than her contemporaries Updike, Roth, and Bellow.

First line: "Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously."

Last lines: "The voice from the telephone went on and on like gas leaking from a pipe. Sophie and Otto had ceased to listen. Her arms fell away from his shoulders as they both turned slowly to the wall, turned until they could both see the ink running down to the floor in black lines...."

Here are a few more quotes:

"What the owners on the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and direction."

"All around them were official buildings, with the peculiarly threatening character. of large carnivorous animals momentarily asleep."

Otto and Charlie were like "smiling people in a swimming pool, kicking each other under water."

"She had only recently realized that one was old for a very ong time."… (more)