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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Paula Fox. Photo: Coliena Rentmeester. Courtesy of the author and Henry Holt and Company
Paula Fox was rediscovered in the mid-1990s, when Jonathan Franzen found her second novel, Desperate Characters, at the artists’ colony Yaddo. Franzen, enthralled, wanted to teach the book, but there were few copies around. He contacted Fox and wrote about it and her for Harper’s. An editor, Tom Bissell, read Franzen’s essay and contacted Fox. The rest, we like to say, is history. But history, in all cases, is made by many hands.
Fox’s novels have been reprinted, and she is having a writer’s second birth and life. Fox and I were paired to read at the National Arts Club in 1999 by the series curator, Fran Gordon. That night, Fox read from The Widow’s Children, her third novel. I listened, ecstatic. Why had I never heard of her? I bought Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children and Poor George, her first novel. I hoped to interview her. Now, this interview in BOMB’s 25th-anniversary issue.
This provenance exists to register how strangely books live and die, and travel, how idiosyncratic their routes, how capricious a writer’s career, how haphazard a reader’s chances to find her books. Great literature disappears all the time. After his death, Chaucer disappeared for over 200 years. Every writer a reader loves, with few exceptions, or who is touted now, will be buried forever or a while. Writers sometimes make it their job to unearth other writers. It’s not just altruism.
Fox is the author of six brilliant novels, two breathtaking memoirs and 22 children’s or young-adult books. To me, it is indubitable that Fox is one of America’s greatest living novelists. Her exquisite choices of language and imagery, her formidable intelligence, her acute observations, her honesty about the trouble with existence here, or anywhere, makes reading Fox a genuine experience. If you let it, her writing will ravish you, even devastate you.
