Moral Hazard: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Kate Jennings (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Kate Jennings's first novel, Snake, was praised for combining "dry comedy" and "genuine heartbreak"; now she has used the same sweet-and-sour recipe in her second book, Moral Hazard--but with even more raw ingredients. The heroine is thirtysomething Cath, a smiling, punning, do-gooding bien pensant who has somehow ended up in the vicious purlieus of Wall Street, dealing billions with the great white sharks of high finance. This unfeasibly high-powered employ contrasts sharply with Cath's home life. She's married to a man 25 years her senior: "sweet Bailey, dearest Bailey... optimistic where I was pessimistic, enthusiastic where I was distrustful." This marriage is not perfect: as Cath mordantly observes, "marriage is awful in its nearness. Yoked together, bound, in a three-legged race with no finishing line." Nevertheless Cath and Bailey, in their May/December way, have found a kind of happiness. Then, horribly, Bailey is diagnosed with Alzheimer's....

Three chapters in we learn this terrible truth, and the rest of the book concerns Cath's desperate, affecting, sardonic, resolute ways and means of dealing with Bailey's rollercoaster ride to the inevitable--or even worse. It's not an easy journey; this is not the easiest of books. What largely rescues the whole from being a whiny or self-pitying lament is the prose: humorous, energetic, sharp, urbane, and vivid. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
This short, self-assured novel by Australian-born Jennings (Snake) brilliantly depicts the complicated life of a working woman on Wall Street during the dot-com boom. Cath, a freelance writer in her 40s, is married to Bailey, who's 25 years her senior. When he develops Alzheimer's, she takes a speech-writing job at an investment bank to pay for his expensive medical care. Wry but realistic, and realizing her position in a rigid boys' club hierarchy, she suppresses her liberal sensibility and defers to the chauvinists who dominate the firm, even cozying up to Horace, the company's most Machiavellian executive. Cath's Virgil through this hell is Mike, a cynical but gabby risk manager whose gossip and instruction illuminate the high-stakes office politics and dismal science of Wall Street. As Bailey deteriorates, in scene after heartbreaking scene, Cath finds unexpected succor "in the belly of the beast." Jennings, herself a former Wall Street speechwriter, makes it clear that the mad math of high finance and the delusions of Alzheimer's resemble one another: it's a metaphor she exploits with dramatic consequences in this piercing novel, gleaming with facets of hard-won knowledge, polished by experience and a keen intelligence. An ideal subway read for smart working men and women, it masterfully documents the culture of economic and corporate arrogance, while never losing sight of the human cost of such hubris. National advertising; 6-city author tour.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Fourth Estate; 1st edition (May 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007141084
• ISBN-13: 978-0007141081
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,654,800 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars UNIQUE, MOVING AND INCISIVE, June 10, 2002

By	Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Concise and clear-eyed, forthright and fearless all aptly describe the lucid prose of Australian writer Kate Jennings whose first novel, Snake, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She possesses a gift for taut imagery: "The house of illness is papered with euphemisms." Or, "...his promises exited his mind backward, like tottering geishas."

With "Moral Hazard" Ms. Jennings offers, if you will, a morality/mortality tale in which the madness of the world of high finance (appropriate considering Enron) and the delusional states of Alzheimer's disease stand cheek by jowl, emphasizing the similarities.

Cath, a freelance writer in her forties, is happily married to Bailey, a creative soul in his mid sixties. "He was always doing, always curious," she says. "He surrounded me with warmth." When he is diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer's it becomes quickly apparent that she cannot provide the care he will need on their current income.

Therefore she finds work at Niedecker on Wall Street although she is "an unlikely candidate for the job of executive speechwriter, to be putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables."

Cath's guide through the miasma of high finance and cutthroat office maneuvering is Mike, a caustic, voluble risk manager. The two became friends on the day of Nixon's funeral, which was declared a holiday on Wall Street. Mike's tutelage proves invaluable, as he advises her to stop bucking the firm lest she be broken. "Round off your sharp edges," he counsels, "Turn yourself into an anthropologist."

At home she faces the inevitability of Bailey's decline. Initially anti-psychotic medicine is prescribed. Then, after consulting a line up of professionals Cath determines that Bailey must be relegated to a nursing home. He, of course, cries, weeps, "recoiling in horror,,,,,beyond comfort" when he is left in "...a place where behavior was infantile, instincts animal. A place of last things."

In due time, while he never makes peace with his surroundings, Bailey does make a friend in the home. She is Dolly, another Alzheimer's patient with a penchant for brilliant colors and black patent leather shoes. When confined to a wheelchair, Bailey finds a second friend in Gwen, a Jamaican private aid hired by Cath. An intuitive caregiver, Gwen lavishes him with affection and treats him with respect.

"Moral Hazard" is a unique story, both moving and incisive as it explores the worlds of trade and sickness with insight, compassion, and humor. A former senior speechwriter at an investment bank, Ms. Jennings well knows of what she writes, and she does it with incomparable precision...

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Witty Woman Languishes Among Rapacious Madmen, July 18, 2002

By	M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This fine novella, a mere 50,000 words or so of taut invective against the greed of aspiring Wall Street shakers, is written in the style of an autobiographical essay, a winning strategy as Jennings juxtaposes the anguish of caring for her husband, suffering from Alzheimer's-driven dementia, with the novel's even more virulent dementia, the craziness and moral grotesqueness of all the avaricious, ego-piggish colleagues the narrator, Cath, must contend with day in and day out as she works as a corporate speech writer. The narrator's voice is sharp, pungent, and never sentimental as she describes her alienation at work and her despair at witnessing her older husband, twenty-five years her senior, disintegrate at the hands of Alzheimer's Disease.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars MORAL HAZARD blinks yellow warning lights!, October 1, 2002

By	"kierie" (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

MORAL HAZARD

Read this book. Even by the second chapter, you'll understand you are entering a world that is mad as a hatter, only that the diagnosed alzheimer patient (the author's husband) is way more lucid than the bulls (the author's bosses) who ram Wall Street down our economic throats. Moral Hazard blinks yellow warning lights even when the words slice into neat little pats of cold butter on warm toast at breakfast. This makes the story edible in deceptively gentle prose. What seems like a peculiar combination of subjects is - dementia on Wall Street countered by a beloved husband's alzheimers' trials and indignities. Somehow the two stories fit hand in glove and come out swinging the reader into black-eyed shame for our dual neglect of an aging population, and withering pension funds ground into dust by tassle-shoed Big Toes. There's more, but then, that would be telling. Read Moral Hazard for yourself. I did. Twice.