Kate Jennings: Moral Hazard

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

During the 1990s, Australian writer Kate Jennings, who has lived in New York City for nearly 25 years, worked as an executive speech-writer at several Wall St investment banks. At the end of that decade, she also suffered the terrible experience of having her older husband die of Alzheimer's.

Out of that experience grew this slim, powerful novel, an Enron-like morality tale which also encompasses intense personal issues of grief and loss, about a liberal woman forced, through her husband's illness and the consequent need for sizeable bucks, to work for a Wall St investment bank, fictional Niedecker Benecke.

Through Cath - in her 40s, a "bedrock feminist, unreconstructed left-winger, with literary tastes that ran to recherche writers like Charlotte Mew and Ivy Compton-Burnett"- Jennings brings to life the mystic issues (derivatives, hedging) and high-adrenalin intrigue of that hectic, self-obsessed, idealistic world.

Cath's beloved husband of just 10 years, Bailey, 25 years her senior, has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

The novel shifts, in mostly alternating chapters, between her disintegrating home life (and later rest-home) and office, where she is befriended by Mike, a cynical risk manager and former student radical, who encourages her to treat her time on Wall St as an exercise in social anthropology.

While there are obvious autobiographical roots to this novel, and it is very moving, it is also wholly unsentimental and very, very brainy. Jennings is an incisive thinker who never lets herself, or her character, off the hook: Cath meets every challenge head-on and navigates her way through it all, her grasp of the world expanding with every chapter.

Jennings' skill is to have tied two such apparently worlds-apart scenarios into a coherent, thematic whole. Cath, wandering the aisles of a department store after work is "relieved to be where nothing was demanded of me. I was commuting, it seemed, between two forms of dementia, two circles of hell. Neither point nor meaning to Alzheimer's, nor to corporate life, unless you counted the creation of shareholder value."

Survival, betrayal - these are the matters that demand moral choice, or moral hazard, as the financial world has it. Cath, stoical yet deeply sympathetic, leads us firmly through the maze.

Picador, $27.95