{"id":108394,"date":"2017-03-04T12:37:23","date_gmt":"2017-03-04T17:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=108394"},"modified":"2017-03-05T11:26:07","modified_gmt":"2017-03-05T16:26:07","slug":"paula-fox-1923-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/04\/paula-fox-1923-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Paula Fox, 1923\u20132017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a kind of poetic mind that sees connections between things. I think that ability to make connections is part of the open secret of what a writer does. Everything on that side table there has a certain connection: Family pictures \u2026 An eighteenth-century Japanese bowl. But there\u2019s a kind of theme that holds all those things together. The thing is to discover what that theme is. Everything on that table has a certain\u00a0benevolence<\/em>. That\u2019s not the table I mostly write about, because there are other chords, that are not benevolent, that I tend to strike.
\n\u2014Paula Fox, The Art of Fiction No. 181<\/a>, 2004<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paula Fox died this week in Brooklyn at ninety-three, a loss felt deeply here at The Paris Review<\/em>. Over the years, we have published<\/a> her fiction,\u00a0interviewed<\/a> her for our Writers at Work series, and, in 2013, honored her\u00a0with\u00a0our Hadada Award\u00a0for lifetime achievement<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After a difficult childhood\u2014marked by her parents\u2019 alcoholism, her intermittent schooling, an earthquake, and a revolution in Cuba, where she lived with her grandmother\u2014Fox went to a boarding school in Montreal, where she discovered the work of D. H. Lawrence, whom she credits with transforming her. As an adult, she\u00a0bounced between odd jobs in New York until deciding, in her early forties, to write seriously.<\/p>\n

The novels that followed struggled to find a following, each of them going out of print by the early 1990s\u2014even as she enjoyed great success with\u00a0her children\u2019s books, for which she received a Hans Christian Andersen Award, a Newbery Medal, and a National Book Award.<\/p>\n

But Fox\u2019s adult fiction made a resurgence in the late nineties, when several of her novels were reissued to a new and adoring audience of younger readers. Tom Bissell, instrumental in the publication of a new edition of Fox\u2019s masterpiece\u00a0Desperate Characters<\/em>, called it an\u00a0\u201codd, prescient, intense, brilliant, and upsetting novel<\/a>,\u201d and said, \u201cI\u2019m still not entirely sure what happened or why the novel caught on in the way it did \u2026\u00a0The credit goes, of course, to Paula, for being capable of writing a novel that cuts across generations and aesthetic tastes like no other modern novel I know. Postmodernists love it. I love it. Hipsters love it. Academics love it. Realists love it. My mother loves it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl,\u201d Fox said. \u201cMy childhood was a difficult one so I was able to observe the bowl and the water and the algae and everything else from a very early age.\u201d As a result, she was preoccupied, as Oliver Broudy observed, with the \u201cvarious ways adults manage to live with the lies they tell themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan Franzen, who famously evangelized Dangerous Characters <\/em>in a 1996 essay in Harper\u2019s<\/em>, wrote that he had \u201cnever read a book before that was about the indistinguishability between an interior crisis and an exterior crisis.\u201d This is the power of Fox\u2019s work\u2014its devastating realism. \u201cI think it\u2019s not helpful to over-psychologize,\u201d Fox once cautioned. \u201cIt substitutes for the chaos that most of us live in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The novelist Paula Fox has died at ninety-three; in 2013, we honored her with our Hadada Award for lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[10521,2122,9682,110,13729,747,11989,9683,7782,2608],"class_list":["post-108394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-desperate-characters","tag-hadada","tag-hadada-award","tag-jonathan-franzen","tag-novelists","tag-novels","tag-obituaries","tag-paula-fox","tag-the-art-of-fiction","tag-tom-bissell"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPaula Fox, 1923\u20132017<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The novelist Paula Fox has died at ninety-three; in 2013, we honored her with our Hadada Award for lifetime achievement.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/04\/paula-fox-1923-2017\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Paula Fox, 1923\u20132017 by Sylvie McNamara\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 4, 2017 \u2013 The novelist Paula Fox has died at ninety-three; 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