the widow’s children

The Widow’s Children by Paula Fox (Dutton, 1976)

Fox seems to specialize in troubled, flawed, and unlikable characters, adjectives that perfectly fit all three  children of Alma Maldonado, the titular widow in this book.  She emigrates from Spain to Cuba when she is 16 to marry a much older plantation owner.  She flees to New York city in the 50s with her three children, Laura, Carlos, and Eugenio, losing both her wealth and social status in the move.  All this is back story to the main events in the novel, which transpire during 24 hours  in the 1970s.  Laura and her second husband Desmond are about to embark on a voyage to Africa and have gathered their closest friend, Peter Rice, and relatives, Laura’s brother Carlos and Clara, her daughter from her first marriage, for drinks at their New York city hotel and dinner at a fancy restaurant on the eve of their departure.  Clara, Laura’s only child (the other were all successfully aborted), was abandoned by her mother and raised entirely by her grandmother (Alma) who has died in the nursing home where she has been living, unvisited, for several years just as the action begins. 

The characters’ interactions over drinks and dinner are tinged with resentment and bitterness, and all of this ugly (and drunken) behavior is meticulously and exhaustively observed by Fox.  Her willingness to plunge so deeply and totally into this extremely unpleasant terrain is audacious and somewhat fascinating, and she steers the reader through this witches’ brew with a merciless and unfaltering hand.  The new day, which finds all the characters reunited at Alma’s (hastily arranged) funeral, is a bit softer and less fraught with despair, but this is a bitter and cold book, which would probably be unreadable were it not for Fox’s ability to present her characters with such incredible clarity and precision.