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 am rabid, I am equal to what is outside." Besides sickness, "rabid" also suggests the dissociated quality of raving. In the same novel the animadversions against contemporary civilization uttered by one of the characters, a college professor and an erstwhile socialist, are described as "an old habit of words." In The Widow's Children (1976), Peter, an editor for a publishing company, takes exception to Laura's use of the word "nigger," to which she responds, "All right, my dear Peter. I know your sensibilities. They're all about language, aren't they?" If at one point in that novel Fox seems to parody the ambition to have words adhere to what they designate—a group of women have badges "inscribed" with their names pinned to their gowns—in Desperate Characters Otto (Sophie's husband) tells of a man who takes apart and reassembles used typewriters so that the keyboards spell out "mystic nonsense words." The idea is an enormous commercial success, which the man justifies by saying that "the destruction of a typewriter and its reconstitution, its humanization, as a kind of oracle, was a direct blow at American Philistinism." He begins to buy things, but, in order not to be corrupted by his success, he deforms these luxurious objects enough to ruin their function. This "revolutionary" aesthetic is, interestingly enough, accompanied by a brutal authoritarianism toward his wife, whose least creative gesture he suppresses.

Such deformation is a theme of both Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children. In the former novel Sophie buys a radio for her lover, Francis Early, who then seems to replace it with a better, more powerful radio, about which he says: "I can get the world," which allows him to crowd out Sophie. Instead of smashing the new radio, which is what Sophie wants to do, she smiles: "She didn't know how to violate that mutual smile of theirs. It was miasmic. It stayed on her face while she undressed. It would not go away, and she bore it home with her, a disfiguring rictus." Smiles are always disfiguring in Fox's novels because they are masks used to disguise intent, to ward off aggression, or to play at one's own feelings: "At the thought, she felt her mouth contort into what she could only imagine as a hideous smile of malice." Sophie also notes of her relation with Francis that it has shoved her violently into herself, a turnabout that relates to both novels' theme of crookedness. In Desperate Characters, for example, Charlie Russel talks with Sophie about the breakup of his partnership with Otto. Suddenly he mutters, "Why do I feel like a crook?" One character says of Charlie that he is "a bleeding heart, dying to be loved. He has the face of a handsome baby, doesn't he?" What another character calls Charlie's "impeccable attitudes" stem from his desire, above all, for innocence, a desire that falsifies his "virtuous opinions." Charlie, however, points to the same kind of crookedness in the culture at large. Everything, he says, is a business: "the having children business, the radical business, the culture business, the collapse of old values business, the militant business … every aberration becomes a style, a business. There's even a failure business." Francis Early's personality is interesting in this respect: "He couldn't seem to help himself—even his bitterness was somehow turned to personal profit. It added to his mystery, it gave his smile an elusive sadness, and it was an element in that quality he had of always recognizing the real meaning that lay behind people's words, as though his soul attended in the wings of a theater, ready to fly out and embrace them in universal awareness." Despite her own awareness, however, Sophie is taken in by Francis, whom she sees in the same way as Charlie sees himself. In this society irony becomes a kind of cancer that makes it almost impossible to distinguish between reflecting and reacting against cultural phenomena: "Whether she was celebrating their new affluence, or making an ironic comment, I don't know." When Leon, erstwhile socialist, says to his former wife, Claire, "I'd take my shopping sack all over the city before I'd settle for sour grapes," he reveals in Aesopian fashion the anxiety with which the middle class tries to certify its experience as genuine. Charlie, talking indignantly about the problems of the poor, says, "You just wait"—as if he identifies with them and against his own class. Immediately, however, he excludes Sophie also from that warning: "I didn't mean you, Sophie. I don't know what I mean." Because he feels "murdered" by Otto's refusal to recognize his virtue, he becomes murderous by class proxy. Similarly, Charlie's letting go of Sophie's arm as she stumbles—"as though by stumbling she'd forfeited her right to his support"—shows how understanding can be a means of evasion—as if virtuous opinions exempted one a priori from the judgments they implied.

Following an exchange in which Francis Early notes that his wife is indifferent to things but wants to know the name of everything and Sophie claims, disingenuously, not to know the names of anything—as if a shell game were being played with reality, Sophie points out that she and Francis have "both been crooked." One can appreciate why problems of order (like the theme of entropy in Thomas Pynchon's works) are so crucial in contemporary fiction. Since outer, perceivable order tends to manifest an underlying order, whether physical, social, or cognitive, one must evaluate orderly form in terms of the organization it signifies: "The form may be quite orderly and yet misleading, because its structure does not correspond to the order it stands for." The statement reminds one of the opacity of rhetoric decried by Socrates in the Phaedrus. At one point in Desperate Characters, Sophie observes Otto as he sleeps: "Even in sleep he looked reasonable, although the immoderately twisted bedclothes suggested that reason—in sleep—had been attained at a cost." Late in the novel Sophie discovers a passage underlined twice by Otto: "To vindicate the law." Having learned that young boys have been hanged for the vindication, Sophie thinks: "How had Otto felt, reading those lines sometime during the night? Had the hanging of young boys appalled him? But why had he underlined the words? Did he mean that the horror of law is that it must be vindicated? Or had he thought of himself, of his own longing for order? Or was the double line an expression of irony? Or did he think law was only another form of that same brute impulse which it was directed toward restraining?" Such lucidity concerning the law is fatal in primitive societies which depend on a scapegoat mechanism to relieve them of their immanent violence. A profound deception allows them to expel their own violence and then to confound it with other natural forces. A judiciary system, on the other hand, limits violence by rationalizing it—by investing it in a judiciary authority. Sophie's concern with the legitimacy of the law is part of the concern Fox's characters express with the validity of values in general. Otto, for example, unlike Charlie, wants to be "left out" because he does not want to be "taken in." As Sophie says to him, "You're so full of cunning, catching everyone out … the American form of wisdom!" When he looks back at his brownstone house, he wants "to catch the house empty," as if to indicate that he is not duped even by his own sense of security. Otto formulates a reciprocal paradox to the one concerning the law when he says of the young, "They are dying from what they are trying to cure themselves with." Otto, however, wants the security toward which he seems ironical, which is why he expresses such respect for the legal process that Charlie sees as "an ironic joke." Accused of being a "square" and thought of as being "reductive," Otto tells Sophie that she does not "draw enough lines." His desire for rational limits is seen in the following description: "Telephone cables, electric wires, and clothes lines crossed and recrossed, giving the houses, light poles, and leafless trees the quality of a contour drawing, one continuous line." Sophie, who has lost all real interest in work and bemoans her own inertia, seeks an illusory redemption in her relationship with Francis. If Otto tries "to catch the house empty," she tries to force from her consciousness the realization that the room in which she lies with Francis is "except for her own presence … empty." When she assures herself, however, that she is "going to get away with everything" (her affair with Francis and her being bitten by a cat), she begins to cry and finds the following sentence in a book: "Illnesses do their work secretly, their ravages are often hidden." During her affair, that she is getting away with it is "harrowing" to her, that such a "violation" of her habitual intimacy with Otto should leave so little evidence. When she looks at Otto, who is unaware of her "violation," his forehead is "furrowed" as he eats some applesauce. Such imagery occurs also in The Widow's Children, where Peter has "a worrying sense that a day had passed without leaving a mark," and where problems of intimacy tend to be "harrowing." In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon uses images like these in a context that recalls lines from Oedipus the King "How, how could the father's furrows, alas, bear to keep silence for so long?" In an "infected city" Oedipa Maas (whose last name means "loophole" in Dutch) imagines an "unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare" as a "special relevance to the word" that will liberate man from relations of sterile rivalry. Fox's characters suffer from the same sense that real existence is somehow elsewhere and that their acts have no real consequences.

Otto's drawing of lines—which sometimes result in excluding Sophie also: "He had closed her out into the house"—is not in itself sufficient: "I wish someone would tell me how I can live," he says. But Charlie's sentimentality is no solution, as one parodic figure in the novel indicates: "She was staring down at a copy of Life magazine, her mouth open." In a subtle way Fox associates Charlie with the dissolution that contrasts with Otto's fastidiousness. The trigger for the novel's plot is a cat's biting Sophie as she tries to show it affection. The words "edge" and "ledge," repeated frequently throughout the book, help to convey the sense of violation committed by the cat. At first the creature is described rubbing its half-starved body with "soft insistence" against the door of a house that seems "powerfully solid" to Otto, but when it turns against Sophie's insistently friendly hand, it is a "circle of barbed wire." The cat's head, moreover, is described as "massive, a pumpkin, jowled and unprincipled and grotesque." When Charlie knocks on the door early in the morning, Sophie holds her bitten hand "stiffly against the soft folds of her nightgown," and before she recognizes Charlie, she sees a large body swaying on the other side of the door and a "large head" veering toward it. In addition, Charlie turns on Sophie later and says, "You don't know what's going on…. You are out of the world, tangled in personal life." The cat's attack brings home the same point to her. "Life had been soft for so long a time, edgeless and spongy." The association of Charlie and the cat is compounded by another "beast" in the book. Sophie's friend Claire tells her about Leon's new wife, a "dull girl who's convinced herself she's a creature of unbridled lust." Having deceived Leon with a thesis on Henry James, she now waits for him "behind the door, stark naked, liberated from intellectual concerns, his beast, she calls herself." The mention of James and "beast" suggests "The Beast in the Jungle"—his story about a man who spends his whole life waiting for something extraordinary to happen and then discovers that the extraordinary thing is that nothing has happened. When Sophie is bitten by the cat, she feels shame—as though she has been caught "in some despicable act"; she feels "vitally wounded" though she tries to tell herself that it is only her hand; and when she tells someone that she has been bitten before, she stammers slightly as if she has "tripped over her lie." Her statement, "I'd been feeding the damned beast and it turned on me," sounds like a line from The Libation Bearers, but here the "beast" is her own inertia and sloth—the good sentiments that substitute for the half-starved reality of the cat—and the bite is a "small puncture" in her "fatuity."

The beast in the jungle is a deception—like Le Canard Prive ("the decoy") visited by the restaurant goers in The Widow's Children. That novel also contains a significant lie. When Laura asks her daughter, Clara, whether her dress is French, Clara replies, "No … I got it on sale." Fearing Laura's judgment of her extravagance—and of the self-assertion that it represents—Clara passes her original off as a copy. The problem of personal sovereignty is accompanied in Fox's novels by various kinds of lighting and indications of weather. In Desperate Characters "brilliant wall lights" give the appearance of a sale in progress although no "copy of anything on the premises" can be found. In keeping with the theatrical imagery of both novels, the host of that house (a psychiatrist) looks like "a man preceded into a room by acrobats," and Sophie holds up a mirror to his face after reciting these line of Baudelaire: "Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, / Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres vieux." In this "rainy country" light has some peculiar qualities. Although Sophie, for example, criticizes Otto for examining everything "in the light of what Charlie would have to say," she admits to having seen her lover, Francis, in the same way Charlie sees himself. In her recollection of being with Francis, "Light seemed everywhere at once" although the room seems empty of his presence. Light and seeing are deceptive. At first Sophie finds Francis "touching," but he cannot really touch anyone—Otto, with unintentional ambiguity, says that Francis does not take him in. Francis' apparent responsiveness to people is the "only provision" he carries. Similarly, when Mr. Haynes says of his family, "We're here for all the world to see," he is repudiating the city folks with an exaggerated image of "country folks" who "do love their kitchens." During the episode in the country, Haynes's truculence is described as "gleaming through his smile like a stone under water." A stone, we recall, has been thrown through the window of a house belonging to friends of the Bentwoods, and Sophie experiences her momentary but powerful detestation of Otto as she assumes a "Medusa's face," which, of course, turns people to stone. In The Widow's Children, Peter thinks of "something hopeless … embedded like a stone at the heart" of his failed marriage and shortly afterwards enters a bookstore in which a mirror is being installed to prevent thefts. The proprietor complains, "Who's supposed to watch that mirror all the time?" These images have occurred in another important scene: when Clara is taken to one of the Hansens' "borrowed apartments" to see her father and mother, she looks up to see "Laura standing in a doorway, holding a glass in which ice cubes floated, looking at her. It was as though a stone had looked at her. Suddenly Laura had hurled the glass into the room." The "glass" is also a mirror that Laura is trying to smash as she sees her reflection in Clara—excluded by Laura as Laura has been excluded by Alma, her own mother. As far as theft is concerned, Laura accuses Clara of stealing her voice (the aural counterpart to her image). Such imitation is pandemic in the novel—like the shadows of Plato's cave. At one point a "sober ventriloquist" seems to have taken charge of Desmond's voice. Laura does crude imitations of the Jewishness she repudiates in her own past, and her first husband, Ed Hansen (whose "charm," like Charlie's in Desperate Characters, is a kind of mask), is said to have imitated Laura's mother wonderfully. Alma, in turn, was also a good mimic, especially good at imitating one of her sons, Eugenio, who says of his whole family what Plato says of opinion: "We have all learned by imitation…. In my family we could never do anything but imitate. We never knew."

Desperate Characters begins with an image reminiscent of Shelley's neo-Platonic "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity, / Until Death tramples it to fragments." If light seems "everywhere at once" with Francis, and if a painter friend can describe his life with "the calm zealotry of one who has received truths from the sun," the Bentwoods' experience of life is somewhat different. The "strong light" at the beginning is "softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade." In their "living" room, moreover, is a standing lamp, "always lit," with a "shade like half a white sphere." These elements of transcendent unity and immanent dispersion occur throughout the book. Over the windows of the "houses on the slum street" are rags or sheets of "transparent plastic." Later on, cream from a "plastic container" spills all over Otto, who wants to be "left out," and Sophie nurses her memories of Francis "like an old crone with a bit of rag for a baby." Francis tells Sophie how a "glass worm" can be sectioned, and the sections will survive. When someone shatters the window of the house that seems so perfect with all its original things that a sale seems in progress, Sophie and her psychiatrist friend find "a few shards of broke glass." Charlie, who wants to identify with the poor and be part of the solution, says, "Do you know that when people change slowly and irrevocably and everything goes dead, the only way to cure them is a bomb through the window. I can't live that way, as though things were just the same." When Sophie visits her friend Claire, she notes that the whole surface of the building is covered with "dollops of some substance" that looks like "solidified guano," and only a trickle of light seeps through "filthy stained-glass windows." In Claire's apartment, where the light coming through the window is so murky it seems "to have texture," Leon complains that his privacy has been violated in the "age of baby shit." The novel is so full of garbage and dreck that Fox's characters often feel as if they are drowning in a tide of refuse, which also includes debased language. Donald Barthelme has been said to construct "a single plane of truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage." He "has the art to make a treasure out of trash, to see out from inside it, the world as it's faceted by colored jewelglass." No one in Fox's novels is making treasures out of dreck. The closest we come to such transformation is cooking. Leon, having looked back nostalgically on the days when he and Claire had nothing but when, handing out leaflets on Sixth Avenue, he felt that he knew the answers to everything, now shares an interest with Claire in cooking: "It's all that's left…. It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization." In The Widow's Children, Peter recalls his first cooking lesson, which his uncle gave him on the day of his mother's death. Their pie, we learn, "tipped over … and then simply exploded." Their sense of futility reminds us that the artist alone concocts foods "so purely spiritual and momentary they leave scarcely any stools," creates works that "insist more than most on their own reality." As Peter shambles "toward disintegration" in an elemental state of fear, he sees a model ship, a "work of skill and patience, an imitation of reality that was itself a realization." A more ironical moment of transcendence occurs in Desperate Characters when Sophie finds Otto standing at the window—the curtains of which are "gritty" in the "monochromatic dullness" of the morning—and staring at a Negro who, as he reels silently along the sidewalk, holds a "green plastic airplane" and collapses "in violent genuflection."

In The Widow's Children the "foreignness" of the Maldonadas provides an unfamiliar view of the familiar. Carlos and Laura use "comic strip words," and when Eugenio says that his family could never do anything but imitate, he could be talking of the culture at large where imitation and rivalry are what we mean by individuality. Also revealing is the contrast between Laura's "thrilling displays of temperament" and Madame de Bargeton's "ambition and poignant ineptitudes" in the novel by Balzac that Sophie is reading. Whatever the ineptitudes, the ambition of Balzac's characters implies the "conversation, work, solutions" that Sophie finds in the hospital—where an old woman, soaking her hand as Sophie has soaked hers, parodies her sense of futility and puns ironically on "solution." Laura, on the other hand, whose eyes are described as "drowned," relates stories with "a strange shallowness" which implies the irresistible fascination of certain appearances. The parasitism which this fascination engenders is suggested by the story Francis tells of a larva that insinuates itself into the brain of a songbird in order to complete its metamorphosis In The Widow's Children we learn that Peter's friendships with both Laura and Violet have really been a "mindless feeding on someone else's personality." Violet herself is "nebulous" and "indescribable" to herself, and the "increasing materiality" of her life makes her feel more and more abstract. Sophie, who is described as "abstracted" at one point, thinks of her preoccupations as "nebulous" and experiences the materiality of her life as the "shadowy, totemic menace" of the things around her. Despite the "profound spiritual indolence of the Maldonadas," which includes Laura's own "inertia," the self-doubts of Clara and Peter mean that the former believes "no one but Laura" and the latter betrays other people as "his gift to her." The vicarious nature of Peter's and Clara's experiences is conveyed when Peter marries in that he feels that he is "marrying the Hansens, too"; his wife is important only in so far as she allows him to imitate these models. As for Clara, when Peter asks her what she gets out of an affair she is having, she replies, "I feel his pleasure." Peter recalls his father, a man "unadorned by temperament," as a "shelter," a "silent place," but he and Clara cannot "see things in a plain way," Peter knows that Laura arouses men "to empty purpose," and Clara knows that the "self-betraying part of her nature" awakens "in her mother's presence, compelling her to submit to a profound intent in Laura to destroy certainty," but the only "shelter" they find at the end (as they try to break Laura's spell) is in a "family sepulcher." Laura is not "a point in a continuing line of human descent but the apex of a triangle," and an "iron triangle" is the shape of Clara's fate. The irony, however, is that Laura's difference from everyone derives from the same sense of exclusion from which the others suffer. Laura treats Clara as she feels she has been treated by Alma, her mother, and she uses her mother's death to exclude Clara further. If Alma becomes "the old child of her own daughter," Laura views her daughter as a rivalrous sibling: "But she didn't leave Clara…. She never left Clara." When Peter and Clara drive to the funeral, hoping to break the grip of the past, they see a group of Hasidim whom they take to be an omen. Earlier, Eugenio, who has been described like Atropos as he draws thread through a fabric and then bites it off, says, "When one forgets the past, there is nothing, is there?" Like Charlie in Desperate Characters, however, Eugenio can only parody true ideas since the past for him (as for Clara) is only something he continually trips over. Clara thinks to herself, "Perhaps something had really happened, at last," while Sophie thinks, as she contemplates Otto's insistence on vindicating the law, "There was no end to it." Musing over Baudelaire's notion of "spleen," Walter Benjamin says that "the man who loses his capacity for experiencing feels as though he is dropped from the calendar." If Baudelaire "holds in his hands the scattered fragments of genuine historical experience," our modern sense of duree "has the miserable endlessness of a scroll. Tradition is excluded from it." Where "degree is shaked" and "truth" is denuded of the consistency of tradition, illusions of authority flourish. For example, people fear Laura because of her basic deficiency: "She's dead cold inside, half born. She doesn't really know that anyone else is alive. The world—it's only an expanded bubble of herself—what she hates is part of herself…. She never gets outside anything." Although such imperialism is only a variation of their own sense of exclusion—of living hypothetically—it is the source of her authority over people like Peter and Clara. One recalls the loathing that Otto in Desperate Characters feels for Tanya, a woman who, with her long succession of love affairs, remains "grossly virginal." These inconsequential affairs caricature Sophie's own affair with Francis: "She had chosen him at a late moment in her life when choices were almost always hypothetical. It was a choice out of time." Tanya, when staying once with Otto and Sophie, used "every drawer in an immense bureau for the few articles she'd brought with her that weekend," as if personal resources were in an inverse relation to abstract possibilities. Tanya is also related to Sophie's mother, who used to wake Sophie each morning with "derisive applause": "Early risers are the winners." Sophie has never discovered "the prize her mother's words had once led her to believe existed." During the Depression her mother drove with her through the streets where "poor people" lived in order to vindicate their middle-class existence. When Sophie repudiates Tanya over the phone, she says, "You think because somebody's husband sticks it in you, that you've won. You poor dumb old collapsed bag! Who are you kidding!" As opposed to the "prize" the man across the way exposes to Sophie, and which eventually includes his baby, winning in these instances seems an abstract assertion of superiority. In one of many uses of cold in her novels, Fox has Tanya "recovering from a cold" when she calls Sophie, and when Desmond asserts his superiority in a restaurant, "His tone was cold with the tyranny people display in an environment shaped by their ability to pay." The irony is, however, that the environment reflects their own anonymity.

Both Desperate Characters and The Widow's Children are also replete with animal images. Laura, who has kept the news of her mother's death from everyone as her own possession and who has left the restaurant in a rage at Clara's "theft" of her voice, bemoans "the old beasts of her life"—her mysterious impulses. Longing for the "utter quietness of animal being," she remembers how she once undid a knotted string in front of a lion, whose rapt attention she maintained. If we recall that Laura has stolen Clara's inheritance when she has been deprived of her own, we can see that the knotted string resembles the more Gordian knots of R. D. Laing. And when we recall Laing's animadversions against a society that destroys experiences inconsistent with its cliches, we can see that a sense of dispossession is also a more general problem of culture:

So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation. But, as that sage among psychiatrists Harry Stack Sultan once said, "if you tell people how they can sublimate, they can't sublimate." The dynamics of culture are in "the unwitting part of it." Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages.

And characters in Fox's novels are described as "performing bear[s]" or "sluggish beasts." To complicate matters, the bars are constantly moving so that one can never be sure whether he is inside or outside, observer or observed. The failure of Western culture is expressed in various ways in The Widow's Children. If our systems of symbols organize both moral demands and the expressive release from such demands, the two functions have fallen apart in a more remissive culture. At one point Peter and Laura "understood each other; she was ruled by impulse, he, by constraint. And each pitied the other for their subjugation to opposing tyrannies." The erotic, which, as Plato reveals in the Symposium, is supposed to reconcile love of oneself (or of one's own) with love of the other, is parodied here by the pornographic. Clara uses obscene jokes to awaken a response in her relatives, even if it is the aggressive response of laughter. She thinks, "Yet what jokes took the place of, with their abject mangling of the ways of carnal life, their special language more stumps than words, she could not fathom." These "stumps" occur earlier in Laura's description of beggars in Madrid, who shake their stumps at her and laugh. Peter, in turn, describes the characters in the book as "beggars, pinching each other." Hours are "mutilated, debauched"; all things are "pinched, poor, broken, worn ragged"; and Peter's possessions are "shadowed clumps." The obscene joke Clara tries to recall has to do with a woman and a doorknob, and later Desmond, who is "always suspecting crooks"—and whose own narrowness he experiences as a lie, checks the doorknob of the room several times. Like the porn queen, Randy Cunny, who appears in one sequence, Laura also arouses men "to empty purpose" and conveys a false promise of intimacy. If Laura, however, cannot get outside herself, Clara's problem is that she cannot get inside herself to experience her own pleasure. We are told, moreover, that Clara's "not wanting" is an "effort to fend off a huge collapse" against Laura's indifference—as if she is playing possum in order to avoid death. Later, she imitates Laura by imitating a possum, as if partial identification with her avoids a more complete one.

While in Desperate Characters the problem of exchange between inner and outer is conveyed by the theme of excretion, in The Widow's Children it is conveyed by the theme of incorporation. As Freud teaches us, the aim of incorporation is derived from the biological aim of feeding and can occur in other systems besides the digestive one. The eyes, for example, can be involved in such a derived aim. Clara has "the startling impression" that her mother's eye sockets are empty—"like mouths, opening to scream." The sexual relations in the novel reveal relations of autonomy and heteronomy. Laura, for example, swings away from intimate contact with Clara "like an accomplished old adulterer." Carlos, Laura tells us, becomes a homosexual "to avoid supporting a woman." Clara, who has hoped futilely for "rescue" by Carlos, thinks about her visits to him and her father: "They had barely acknowledged her presence, as though she'd been one of Carlos' young men whom she sometimes found there with them." As Peter and Laura talk about Peter's sisters, who excluded him as a child, Laura refers to them as "sister dykes"; and Peter, whose existence has become more and more exiguous, is described as "an old nanny." When Clara cannot find a cartoon that Alma, who uses them to communicate with all the family, has sent to Laura, she thinks: "Had Laura chewed it up and swallowed it?" Among other images suggesting cannibalism, Carlos alludes to the sow that eats its farrow, "I'm becoming an old sow." The "widow" whose children these are has been taught to betray her own experience and to exclude her own children, whom she later comes to dominate "through the tyranny of her pathos." The epigraph of the novel is from Rilke's "Widow": "Deprived of their first leaves her barren children stand, and seem, for all the world, to have been born because she pleased some terror." Alma has "pleased" the "terror" of convention that has become divorced from reality—"La Senora had warned her that she must not notice such things." Eugenio, the child who has suffered most from his family's "fall" from privilege, has a poster on his wall of a castle in Spain: "It was a twelfth-century fortress; the mist enveloping it did not conceal its brutality." The interface between the self and the world recurs throughout the book. With drunken sentimentality, a "kind of mist" settling over his mind. Desmond thinks of the "style" that separates Laura from the middle class. Clara talks of Alma as a fog that surrounds her. Laura and Desmond, like the fortress, are both referred to as "brutes," and Laura's face, when she expresses loathing for the "self-regarding sentimentality" of the Jews, looks "brutish and empty." Laura is like the person in Desperate Characters who says, "I started out with you and ended up with myself," since the "Jew" against whom she fulminates is herself. When Violet (the other woman on whom Peter depends for her temperament) tries to reassure Peter about what she assumes to be his homosexuality, her "conventional language" is "inane, brutal and mawkish."

At the end of the novel, Laura denies the effectiveness of what Peter and Clara have done to liberate themselves from her. In response to Clara's "questioning glance," Peter wants to cry out, "Wait! It's not nothing…. I've almost got hold of it!" The name "Maldonadas," however, which suggests a kind of nihilistic disease, implies that Peter has got hold of nothing. In Desperate Characters the hippie son of the Bentwoods' friends wears an army fatigue jacket "on which were pinned buttons shaped and painted like eyeballs, staring from nothing, at nothing," and in The Widow's Children Carlos, whose inertia is extreme, wears someone else's spectacles. Laura is thought to be able to "see through people," as if a diagnosis were possible among these optical distortions, but all Laura can see through are the "manners" she induces people to assume. What Laura is really good at, as she says herself, is "makeup." We learn at the very end that Peter's revelation is only a reversal of the case: his mother's manipulation of appearances into "some tangled thing" and Laura's own knotted strings hold him. One recalls the girl in Desperate Characters who says of the anklet she wears: "It hurts me to wear it…. Every time I move, it hurts." When Peter says of his mother, "No intelligence at work, and no feeling except vindictiveness toward me because I was hers," he could almost be describing Laura as well. Denied by both of them at the end. Peter is bound as victim to a kind of psychological vendetta. He recalls a morning in childhood when, hearing his mother and sisters in the kitchen and seeing the paw marks of animals "braiding the snow"—an image associated with the "thick plaited design in gilt" (or "guilt") that frames a mirror in Laura's hotel, all Peter wants is "to be good." If, as Peter notes, "Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition," that happens because families can no longer reinforce the purposes of a traditional community or resist the manipulations of its contemporary counterpart.

Fox's characters seem to suffer from a Midas touch. Violet feels "nebulous, indescribable," and the "increasing materiality" of her life seems to deprive her of any real security. Eugenio says of himself, "Beggars can't be choosers" and laughs a "grinding, metallic chuckle." Having lost his patrimony as a child and having actually been "thrown out of people's homes," Eugenio "still waits to be thrown out" as if that alone validated the worth of what is inside. What Eugenio seeks is the "blissful oblivion of wealth," which corresponds to the mindless imitation he sees as characteristic of his family. Laura's voice, similarly, is "metallic, serrated" as she contemplates the "futility" of her mother's absurd wisdom. Her own presence, however, her "elaborate killer's manners," causes only betrayal in others. Her compliment to Clara, for example, is unjust because wounding. That this Midas touch has a cultural dimension is revealed in Peter's remark: "Culture makes one bitter." When Alma comes from Spain to Cuba in order to marry an older man whom she has never met, she experiences a "strange, bitter, piercing smell everywhere—it seemed green to her, like the new bitter green leaves of spring." The bitterness suggests the betrayal implicit in the promise. La Senora has warned Alma that she must not notice certain things, and this gesture of suppression is repeated twice: when Clara visits Laura in one of the "Hansens' borrowed apartments," her father puts his fingers to his lips, "warning her to be silent as though someone were sleeping"; and in the restaurant Laura makes a similar gesture when Clara claims that she is "really full." One of the rules by which we often abide is the denial that we live by rules. Laura, for example, is thought to be lawless, but the principal rule suggested by these gestures is: "Thou shalt not implicate thy mother in matters of fullness or emptiness." The same sense of promise is conveyed in Peter's first meeting with Laura and Ed Hansen: "It had been a spring day, the room smelled of the unthawed earth and the first fresh greenness outside … the light had been so sweet, so clear!" "Sweetness" is associated with hope and rescue. Carlos, who is "sweet" but ineffectual, cannot "do much for anyone" although Clara has looked to him for rescue. The old man who bakes a cake with Peter after the death of Peter's mother is also described as "sweet." The pie Peter makes with his uncle tips over and then explodes—like the empty form of self-realization associated with Laura. In the restaurant Clara has "a bittersweet recall of the outside natural world, the coarse shifting earth upon which squatted these hotel and restaurant strongholds, so close, muffled, airless." For these city people, whose longing resembles that of Socrates' pastoral prayer, the "natural world" is the name given to their disappointment with "culture." The word "coarse" is crucial in both novels because it refers to the material dimensions of culture. In a culture which trivializes ideals by the sheer weight of its material means and which also turns ideals into fads by means of its tolerance, one can either take "visible pleasure" in one's coarseness or make capital out of one's disappointments. Although Francis "coarsens" a bit in Desperate Characters, his "limpidity of expression" derives from his ability to turn everything, even bitterness, to personal profit. In The Widow's Children Clara experiences a sense of "bitter triumph" at being deprived of her inheritance, and "being broke" conveys an "inherent promise" of "sudden dramatic reversal" although it never comes. The disappointment of success, however, is irreversible. In the "rainy days" of March, Desmond recalls, he had dreams in college which he cannot now recall. In their rainy country Paula Fox's characters feel deprived of their sovereignty—the inevitable result, perhaps, of each man having become his own king.