Moral Hazard - Softcover

Jennings, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007154623 ISBN 13: 9780007154623

Publisher: HarpPeren, 2003

Synopsis

On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Funny, liberal and left-leaning, she is an unlikely candidate to be writing speeches on derivatives in a Manhattan tower, 'putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables'. She finds herself on Wall Street because she needs serious money. After ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is suffering from Alzheimer's.So begins Cath's journey into two nightmare worlds. By day she deals with the topsy-turvy logic and ingrown personalities at work in high finance; by night she has to watch the slow disintegration of the man she loves. In between, she must stop herself from falling apart. As the money markets hurtle towards financial meltdown, Cath faces personal disaster and a moral hazard that she cannot ignore.Kate Jennings' prose is lean yet rich in unexpected, telling detail. Tense, taut and compulsively readable, Moral Hazard is peopled by extraordinary characters and informed by a mordant, witty intelligence.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Jennings, who grew up in rural Australia, has lived in New York City since 1979. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Snake, as well as a number of volumes of poetry, essays, and stories. During the nineties she worked as an executive speech writer at several Wall Street investment banks.

Reviews

Jennings's title is the term used on Wall Street to describe dubious transactions (often high-risk ones that rely upon government bailouts), and in her spare, unsettling novel the human transactions are far more harrowing than the financial ones. The narrator is Cath, a woman in her forties, whose husband, Bailey, has been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Desperate for money, Cath takes a job that she hates—speechwriter for a second-rank investment bank, a place "where women were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag." Her loathing of the corporate world is accompanied by her increasing horror at the mental disintegration of her husband; she is disgusted by the greed that surrounds her, but her unsentimental chronicle of the progress of a disease is what makes this fine, short novel almost unbearably sad.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: HarpPeren
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007154623
• ISBN 13: 9780007154623
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192