THE WIDOW'S CHILDREN

by Paula Fox ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1976

What a splendid novel, distancing well beyond Paula Fox's disarmingly Desperate Characters in both its immediate insights and final shaft. Although, like the earlier book, it is compressed within two days when the widow's children meet at a get-together going-away luncheon. ""Deprived of their first leaves her barren children stand"" (the prefatory referral comes from Rilke's ""Widow"") or rather sit in a restaurant under the bitchy tongue and thumb of Laura, a stagey, self-indulgent woman. At first these middle-aged people do not seem desperate, only discordant. The unalike unhappy family includes Laura's two brothers (one a homosexual, the other a professional scrounger), her second, alcoholic husband, an emasculated friend from the publishing world, and her daughter Clara--the only nice one around even if she's a pretty quiet spectator. Gradually in this atmosphere which you could cut with a butter knife, you will be exposed to all their scratchy exchanges. They're pieces in a ""jigsaw of misery fitting together perfectly,"" none of them escaping their larger past as Spanish Jews (who knows, even gypsies) or the everpresent memory of the widow/mother who has just died alone in a nursing home. A simple woman, innocent, submissive, refusing ""to know what life is."" As time goes on, there are contiguous revelations of longstanding guilt, regret, mortification. But at the end perhaps Clara can ""lay"" [the] spooks."" This is a work of marvelous design and subtle synchronization, returning the novel to its proper domain, real people, invested with a life they've been denied elsewhere. And Paula Fox is as always a graceful, style-wise intermediary.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1976

ISBN: 0393319636

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: FICTION