Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
Jigsaw
By Jennifer Schuessler
Borrowed Finery
by Paula Fox
Henry Holt, 210 pp., $23.00
The Widow's Children
by Paula Fox
Norton, 224 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Poor George
by Paula Fox
Norton, 220 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Desperate Characters
by Paula Fox
Norton, 156 pp., $12.00 (paper)
The Widow's Children, Paula Fox's eerily intense 1976 novel about a nasty family evening, begins with a scene of arming for battle. Clara Hansen, a twenty-nine-year-old single woman in New York City, is getting ready for a gathering in the hotel room of her mother, Laura Maldonada, a monstrously caustic aging Spanish beauty about to embark on a cruise to Africa with her rich, boozy second husband. Normally Clara dresses 'defensively,' but tonight she chooses a silk gown, a gauntlet thrown down. Halfway through cocktails, Laura grabs the hem with her clawlike hands and her face freezes in judgment at the label, Christian Dior. Mother and daughter have battled, quietly, over clothes before. Clara's Uncle Eugenio, absent from this demented dinner party, is a collector of rich old ladies, one of whom died in a tower suite at the old Ritz and left Clara a mysterious trunk: perfumed things from Worth, 'chiffon embroidered with silver thread, sachets, a small fur wrap, unworn lingerie covered with lace.' But Laura had taken them for herself since, she tells Clara, they 'would not have suited your age'—too luxurious, and too old-fashioned.
Review, 3921 words
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