MORAL HAZARD

A sharp if somewhat aimless account of an artistic young woman who takes a job as a Wall Street speechwriter to pay for her husband’s medical bills.

Australian writer Jennings (Snake, not reviewed), New York–based, writes in the voice of Cath, a freelance writer who is by her own admission an unreconstructed 1960s leftie, committed to all the usual causes (civil rights, abortion, socialism, feminism, free love) and opposed to greed, rapacity, and hierarchies of privilege. So how did she end up on Wall Street as an executive speechwriter at Niedecker Benecke, “a firm whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas”? For the money, of course—the only raison d’etre you’ll ever find at Niedecker Benecke. Cath’s husband Bailey is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, and Cath needs money (lots of it) for his treatment and care. Bailey is 25 years older than Cath to begin with, and his sudden descent into senility has made him even more distant from her than the age gap alone. The job of writing glowing accounts of corporate greed has provided her with enough alienation to keep her in therapy for decades, but it has its moments: Some of Cath’s colleagues, for example, are just as out of place on Wall Street as she is. Mike, for example, was an SDS protester at Columbia in 1968, and Horace’s sexual tastes could best be described as polymorphic. Her dreadful boss Hannibal (as in Lecter) even provides some unintentional amusement now and again, but most of the office scenes are quickly upstaged by the drama of Bailey’s decline and fall—an account of real pathos that sits ill-at-ease with the sarcastic portrait of corporate venality.

Odd pastiche of elegy and parody: an intelligent and at times genuinely moving story that seems afraid to take itself seriously.