Paula Fox, 93; novelist chronicled dislocation . By Margalit Fox New
York Times . Paula Fox, a distinguished writer for children and adults
whose work illuminated lives filled with loss, dislocation, and
abandonment, conditions she knew firsthand from a very early age, died
Wednesday in Brooklyn. She was 93. Ms. Fox wrote a half-dozen novels
for adults and more than 20 books for young people. What united her
output was a cool, elegant style that was haunting in its pared-down
economy; minute observation; masterly control of tone and pacing; and
an abiding concern with dissolution - of family, of home, of health, of
trust. Her characters are complex, self-contained, and often withdrawn,
but their ruminative interior states lend the narratives a quiet
luminosity. Ms. Fox's best-known novel for adults is "Desperate
Characters" (1970), about the disintegration of a marriage. It was made
into a film of the same title, released the next year and starring
Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. She was awarded the Newbery Medal,
considered the Pulitzer Prize of children's literature, in 1974 for
"The Slave Dancer," a controversial novel centered on the Atlantic
slave trade in the mid-19th century. Her work also includes two
memoirs: "Borrowed Finery" (2001), about her peripatetic childhood, and
"The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe" (2005), about her
life as a young woman. Ms. Fox's bibliography took readers from cradle
to grave, something few other writers have done. It includes picture
books for young children, like "Traces" (2008), a poem, illustrated by
Karla Kuskin, about the evanescent signs - think of footprints and
vapor trails - left by unseen visitors, as well as many titles for
middle-grade readers and teenagers, among them "Blowfish Live in the
Sea" (1970), about a child's journey to visit the father he has never
met; "One-Eyed Cat" (1984), about the painful consequences of a boy's
casual shot with an air rifle; and "The Eagle Kite" (1995), about a boy
whose father is ill with AIDS. Because so much of Ms. Fox's work was
for young people, her fiction for adults was sometimes overlooked. In
1984, The Nation described her as "one of our most intelligent (and
least appreciated) contemporary novelists. In later years, however, her
adult books enjoyed something of a renaissance, thanks largely to the
efforts of novelist Jonathan Franzen, who became an ardent champion
after devouring an out-of-print copy of "Desperate Characters" he had
come across by chance. Ms. Fox's other adult novels - among them "The
Widow's Children," "A Servant's Tale" and "The God of Nightmares" -
have been rereleased by Norton, along with "Desperate Characters," with
introductions by writers including Frederick Busch, Andrea Barrett, and
Rosellen Brown. Paula Fox was born in Manhattan on April 22, 1923, to
parents who did not want her. Her father, Paul Hervey Fox, was an
undistinguished novelist and playwright who earned his living as a
script doctor. Her mother, the former Elsie de Sola, of Spanish and
Cuban extraction, was young, vain, cold "and ungovernable in her haste
to have done with me," Ms. Fox wrote in "Borrowed Finery. Paul and
Elsie floated through the 1920s and '30s in a sea of alcohol, Hollywood
parties, and European travel, none of which, they made plain, was best
experienced with a child in tow. When Paula was a few days old, she was
left, at her mother's insistence, in a foundling hospital. From there,
she embarked on her itinerant young life, bouncing among a series of
friends, relatives, and strangers across the country and in Cuba, where
she lived for a time on a sugar plantation with her grandmother.
Periodically, her parents would turn up, and Paula would be returned to
their dubious care. By the time she was 16, she was more or less on her
own. There was one happy interlude. When Paula was 5 months old, she
was taken in by a stranger, the Rev. Elwood Amos Corning, in a small
Hudson Valley town aptly named Balmville, N.Y. A kind, scholarly man
who lived with his mother, Corning taught Paula about books and nature
and history. She lived with him until she was 6, when her parents
swooped down and parceled her out somewhere else. Ms. Fox studied piano
briefly at the Juilliard School in Manhattan and later attended
Columbia University. She held a series of odd jobs, including modeling,
reporting on the postwar reconstruction of Poland for a British news
service, and teaching emotionally disturbed children. Critical response
to Ms. Fox's work over the years was largely favorable, though there
was sometimes dissent. Her Newbery Medal for "The Slave Dancer"
inspired a protest at the awards ceremony that year: The novel, which
tells the story of a white New Orleans youth conscripted to play the
fife on a slave ship in the 1840s, had been condemned by some reviewers
for portraying the captured African slaves as a passive,
undifferentiated group. In 1997, while visiting Jerusalem, Ms. Fox was
mugged and suffered serious brain injury. The incident, she said
afterward, prompted her to begin writing her first memoir, "Borrowed
Finery. Her recovery was so arduous that it took her a year to write
the book's first 10 pages. Ms. Fox's other honors include the Hans
Christian Andersen Award, which she received in 1978 for her body of
children's work.
