Kate Jennings (1)Besprekingen

According to the NY Times, this is a fine novel. It is a short novel. It's painless to read but I just don't get it.

This is an example of how much can be said in so few words. It is black and compelling and humorous. It resonated. I grew up during this period in this countryside. The landscape, the life, it's all there. The characters are well drawn and understood though not always likeable, certainly Irene is not. One can only wonder at the life Boy and his sister made for themselves after such a beginning. I don't know what else I can say. It's a five star read.

Moral hazard is about a woman whose husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and who, to obtain the money needed for his care in health-care expensive USA, gets a job as speechwriter for a mid-level investment bank on Wall Street. The wife’s name is Cath (not Kate) and the husband’s name is Bailey (not Bob Cato, the name of Jennings’ husband). Kate Jennings, though, did work as a speechwriter on Wall Street. Fictional Bailey and real Bob are both artists/designers, and both men were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but Bailey’s end has a particular drama to suit Jennings’ purpose.

From its very start, in fact, it’s clear that Moral hazard has been carefully written and structured, despite its closeness to Jennings’ life. For my full review, please see: https://whisperinggums.com/2016/02/28/kate-jennings-moral-hazard-review/½

A most intelligent book about working on Wall St in speechwriting. Quieter than highly recommended "Bond Girl", Cath is struggling with the endorsements of crap she has to pump out and also with the onset of Alzheimers in her much older husband. Tragedies, both, but the soul selling means very little in comparison to the loss of her beloved after only ten good years.

"All around us, impossible sums of money were heaped on people who were no more deserving of it than any other kind of professional." And that's mild!

The descent of Cath's husband Bailey into dementia is somewhat mitigated by the strong friendship of Mike, a risk manager, who schools Cath at the beginning of her tenure and helps her to become an adept student of mediocre Wall St managers.

Most painful is her terrible experience at a hardly disguised St. Vincent's Hospital, where the DNR on Bailey and Cath's wishes are brutally disregarded. I do believe this is a truthful tale and oh so vividly and beautifully written. And it would a way better movie than that idiotic "Blue Jasmine".

Wonderful. It is amazing how, through a series of short but succinct chapters, the author built
a vivid picture of a family struggling to connect with each other. Another book
evocative of an era where social expectations defined the role of women.

This is a stark book that evokes the harshness of the Australian bush and the people who try to make a living from the land. The story focuses on Rex and Irene who marry in haste in the aftermath of the 2nd World War. Jenning's writing style is spare with short vignettes rather than chapters that are seemingly unrelated until you finish the book and are left with an overwhelming sense of despair, bitterness, disappointment and tragedy

Compared to Snake, I found this book boring and superficial. I skipped through most of it and just read the parts about Cath and her husband battling the onset of dementia. The bits about her job in the financial industry were extremely dull.

Nearly forty years ago Kate Jennings gave a speech at a Vietnam Moratorium meeting on the Front Lawn at Sydney University. On that day, after a number of speeches from various anti-war organisations, a number of women stepped to the front of the stage area and fanned out across its full width, standing with legs apart and arms folded. Kate stepped to the microphone – the painfully thin designated speaker – and delivered her speech in a voice that shook but didn't break. The speech was intemperate, overblown, bitter, profane and inelegant. It changed my life.

The speech was printed five years later as 'Moratorium: Front Lawn: 1970' in this, Kate's first book. It's a slim vol of poetry, plus the speech and one other short prose piece. The poems haven't generally aged well, though the pain in some of them fairly leaps off the page.

From http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/melancholy-derangement/

I am usually disappointed with memoirs about animals, and, I was really left flat after this effort, in fact I don't think that there was much love lost for her dogs at all. Being a devoted animal lover I found this book so void of true emotion and love, it lacked affection completely. Not one of my favorites, and I will not recommend it to friends either....

In her recent writing, Kate Jennings has established a persona who acknowledges her Australian origins but is a literary New Yorker to her bootstraps. This book is a memoir dealing with two dogs she acquired soon after her husband died in similar circumstances to the husband of the heroine of her novel Moral Hazard. There's a clue on how to read it in an early chapter, where she recalls trying to persuade her elderly father to get a puppy, threatening to have someone dump one on his doorstep, and he astonishes her by weeping.

I would remember times when he was in great distress, but never tears.
'What's wrong, Dad?'
'I had to shoot all my dogs, and I never want to do that again.'
I absorbed this remark, the shock of those tears. When conversation takes a serious turn, Australians throw vats of boiling, spitting oil over one another in the form of humor [sic]. They are not denying their emotions; they are obliterating them. 'Dad,' I said, 'I think this time it'll be the other way around. The dogs are going to have to shoot you.'

The memoir is full of facts about border terriers, enough to make most people resolve to have as little to do with them as possible. It drops in references to many writers: Thomas Mann (German) and Joe Ackerley (English) loom large, and Bob Dylan offers a surprisingly sweet comment about Old Yeller. There is copious Newyorkana, interrupted by an excursion to Bali. Four people told me the book was so slight as to be hardly worth reading, and I almost took them at their word. Having read it, I couldn't agree less. It may be light. It may go on about the cuteness of dogs and (in Bali) monkeys. It may never come right out with effusive expressions of grief or inspirational Kubler-Ross stages. But it tackles exactly the difficulty with serious emotion named in the quote above, and makes it look easy. A cranky review once described another of Kate's books as a kind of ode. This book, too, is a kind of ode: light, spare, witty, poised, allowing hard emotion to well up from the depths. Kate would never have been so crude as to use this metaphor, but her scruffy border terriers, ratters from way back, burrow down into a dark hole in her Riverina stoicism and New York cool and bring back rich, direct heartfelt emotion.

Australian-bred New Yorker Kate Jennings, picked by Black Inc to give us a Quarterly Essay on the recent US election and the global financial crisis leavens her account with plenty of apparent irrelevancies (a bawdy punchline from a Don Rickles show, an excellent anecdote about post 9/11 airport security, delicious bits of lunch-time chat). As Quarterly Essays go, this is one of the least earnest and least controversial. Where Judith Brett's account of the 2007 Australian election was a careful analysis of John w Howard's departure from the Prime Ministry, this is more a celebratory recount of Barack Obama's final sprint to victory, played in counterpoint to the unfolding GFC (as in Global Financial Crisis). Kate may be a stroppy feminist poet and dog lover, but she served time as a speech writer on Wall Street (and wrote about it in [Moral Hazard]), so has a sharp insider–outsider perspective that makes for lively reading. I don't know that I understand the economics of it all any better for having read the essay, but I'm grateful for her weighing in with judgement and an un-mealy mouth. I've come away from it with the mental equivalent of a stimulated palate and a pleasantly full stomach.

Only 90 of the book's 132 pages are taken up with the eponymous essay. The rest is correspondence about Tim Flannery's call to action in climate change in the previous issue. Interestingly, no space is given to denialists, so the effect is of passionately engaged conversation rather than the lobbing of shonky grenades that sometimes passes for public debate on this subject. You have to look fairly hard to discover the name of Quarterly Essay's editor. His name is Chris Feik. He does a bloody good job, at all levels

I thought this would be a great read and am disappointed that it wasn't. Jennings finds new homes for her dogs, Stanley and Sophie - this is the story of how both dogs and author readjust

I usually love Kate Jennings sharp wit, but this really is a book for dog lovers only. There is potential, but the fantastic raw honesty that glints through in parts is overwhelmed by the minutiae of detail on dog ownership in NY. At times this is twee and indulgent, and it feels as though this is the book Kate Jennings is writing instead of the book she is capable of writing.

This was a beautifully written account of morality in the world of high finance contrasted with the morality, or rather moral dilemmas, in one's personal life. Highly readable.

This was a really interesting book. Cath is a left-wing thinker, forced to work on Wall Street when her much older husband, Bailey, develops alzheimers. She begins to lead a double life - writing for the morally corrupt during the day, spending time with her husband at night. Wall Street and her husband begin to fall apart at the same time, and Cath is struggling to hold her life together. And I'm not giving anything else away.

The book is written in an intimate style and you feel really invested in the story. I was suprised when it was over, though the book didn't feel incomplete. Overall a really interesting read.½

FWA guest editor recommendation