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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings
Moral hazard, in the financial world in which KATE JENNINGS's new novel of the same name takes place, describes a situation where insurance -- a guarantee of being bailed out -- allows parties to engage in risky behavior they might otherwise be averse to engage in.
Cath is a speechwriter for the investment bank of Niedecker Benecke which, given that KATE JENNINGS has held pretty much the same job in real life, obviously is an entirely fictional creation, as are the bank's generally smarmy and hypocritical senior executives. (Jennings is far better at sarcasm that I am, but MORAL HAZARD was written before the crop of revelations against which the novel's portrayal seems rather mild.)
Although classic cases of moral hazard -- such as the bailout of Long Term Capital Management -- make their appearance in MORAL HAZARD, author KATE JENNINGS also means the term in its more literal sense, the moral dilemma being, in this case, a husband with Alzheimer's (another autobiographical note). Cath has taken the job, where she is subjected to any number of additional moral hazards, in order to pay for her husband's care.
The book, a compact novel of less than 200 pages, is much more than a compassionate treatment of one of today's most frightening diseases, contrasted with the amoral and immoral goings on in the finance industry. By placing the Alzheimer's in the context of the real world, with a protagonist who needs to adapt to a new life in a new industry, while her husband is descending into a new life of darkness himself, she saves the book from being a one-dimensional tug at the conscience.
Jennings resists the (obvious) temptation to relate the two by, for example, comparing the husband's decline to the inexorable declines in the stock market. She doesn't even use the husband's sincerity as a foil for the hypocrisy of Cath's banker colleagues, because by the time the book opens, the husband's personality is in steep decline. The two story lines are just there, as Cath moves between one life and another.
But read this book for the words.
Jennings was, she says, trained as a poet and it shows. The book is extraordinarily well-written, with spare punchy prose, rhythmic cadences and sharply-drawn images and metaphors. She has an obvious talent for finding the right word. This relatively brief book has a lot of the right words.
Peter Gordon
01/08/2002
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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