SOURCE: "Royalty in a Rainy Country: Two Novels of Paula Fox," in Critique, Vol. XX, No. 2, 1978, pp. 33-48.

In the following essay, Bassoff discusses issues of deformation and paralysis in Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children.

At the end of Plato's Phaedrus, the urban man, Socrates, delivers a beautiful pastoral prayer that includes the request: "May the outward and inward man be as one." Having shown that both erotics and rhetoric are arts of acting on somebody when you have full knowledge and the other does not, Socrates asserts a new kind of erotics—of the living word of face to face dialogue—and prays for that word's adherence to what is present and what is personal. In Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (1970), Sophie Bentwood, whose last name suggests the crookedness against which Socrates is arguing, makes a statement that seems almost parodic of Socrates' prayer: "God, if I...