TITLE: Moral Hazard
AUTHOR: Kate Jennings
GENRE: Fiction, Literary
PUBLISHED: April 2002
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Buy!
MOBILISM LINK: Read
Review: Is Kate Jennings's Moral Hazard the best novel ever published?
Before I answer my own question, I must admit Jennings's auctorial style initially mildly stymied my reading, her sentences punctuated by too many clauses that make for an odd cadence. But by page 2, I realized I was in the hands of a master story-teller; I was hooked, cadence and all. By page 4, I peeked to see the book's total page count because I wanted to savor this novel, immerse myself in its world for a good long while. I was shocked to discover the novel runs a mere 125 pages on my iPad, and that total includes several ancillary pages. (In print, the book runs 198 pages.) Goes to show, quantity is no synonym for quality.
And Moral Hazard is quality of the highest order. In its barest outline, the novel tells the story of Cath, who marries a man, Bailey, 25 years her senior. And though she loves him dearly, she acknowledges readily that marriage is a difficult row to hoe:
After a youth entirely lacking in forethought, I had married. Married? Bedrock feminist? It happens. Sweet Bailey, dearest Bailey. Twenty-five years older than me, imprudent as I, but who cared? He was optimistic where I was pessimistic; enthusiastic where I was distrustful; charming, outgoing, where I was withdrawn, intense. He saw the point of me, not always discernible, and I would have loved him for that alone. He was always doing, always curious. He surrounded me with warmth.
I haven’t put on rose-tinted glasses. We had our problems. George Eliot once wrote that marriage is awful in its nearness. I agree. Yoked together, bound, in a three-legged race with no finishing line.
Alas, a future that will not include long term connubial happiness, a pin dropped at their 10 year mark, their life together suddenly derailed when Bailey is afflicted by dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease. And so, to make ends meet, Cath must find a job. She does just that as a speechwriter for a Wall Street boutique firm, which rankles her sense and sensibility:
An unlikely candidate, then, 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. “SAT word!” “$10 word!” they would write in the margins of draft speeches. There were some inexplicable exceptions, such as the aforementioned “fungible” or, a more recent example, “granular,” which, having gained acceptance against all odds, were clutched as tenaciously as a child might a favorite toy.
An unlikely candidate, too, to be working for a firm whose culture had been shaped by the kind of drive required to shave dimes off dollars without actually making something useful or entertaining, something that could be touched or enjoyed. A firm whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas. A firm where women were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag.
But you are meeting me at a time when my judgment was suspended, my tastes in literature, or anything else, for that matter, irrelevant. I didn’t have the luxury.
Even worse is that Cath is quick to recognize the parallels between capitalism and her husband's dementia. Literally caught between a rock and a hard place, the squeeze between her personal aspirations, the need to make money to pay the bills, and her love for her husband transmogrifying into caretaking for her husband. The all of it requires her to keep her intelligence to herself, her thoughts and opinions shared sparingly and selectively:
"There’s a pretense at democracy. Blather about consensus and empowering employees with opinion surveys and minority networks. But it’s a sop. Bogus as costume jewelry. The decisions have already been made. Everything's hush-hush, on a need-to-know-only basis. Compartmentalized. Paper shredders, e-mail monitoring, taping phone conversations, dossiers. Misinformation, disinformation. Rewriting history. The apparatus of fascism. It’s the kind of environment that can only foster extreme caution. Only breed base behavior. You know, if I had one word to describe corporate life, it would be ‘craven.’ Unhappy word."
An executive at her firm, Mike, and she have the most phenomenal conversations; in the quote below, Mike offers Cath some counsel:
“Can I give you some advice?”
“Okay.” Feeling small.
“That’s not going to change.” Gesturing behind us, again. “And those guys aren’t going to change. If you keep throwing yourself against Niedecker, against them, you’ll break into a million pieces. Round off your sharp edges. Turn yourself into an anthropologist.”
“A naturalist with an ant colony.”
“That’s the spirit. You know, Wall Street isn’t as bad as it seems. Sure, it gets its share of bigots and silver-spoon types. That’s the downside. But it also tolerates eccentrics who wouldn’t find employment anywhere else. You’d be surprised. At one time, having a short attention span was the only qualification you needed to work down here.” His peculiar nasal laugh. “It’s not quite that way now. The dead hand of Human Resources homogenizing everything.” He broke off to light another cigarette. “I know one guy, a trader, who’s an anarchist and proud of it. But nobody cares because he’s good at his job. And then there’re people like you and me.”
Schooled in the financial world, Moral Hazard is pure catnip for me. To the many superlatives I will pile on about her writing, Kate Jennings has the rare ability to use jargon but explain it so well she leaves none of her readers in the book's dust, gasping for oxygen. From a conversation with Mike, early in the story:
I explained the speech, switched on my tape recorder, and asked my dutiful questions. We covered the Group of Thirty recommendations for derivatives regulation, the GAO response, the Basel Agreement. He gave the standard financial industry arguments. Derivatives are risk-management tools, nothing but beneficial, a boon to investors and the economy. To regulate them would be to hinder the flow of money, disrupt the global good. Et cetera.
Mike’s answers were peculiarly without enthusiasm. For the most part, when Communications personnel come calling, corporate henchmen are all smiles: upbeat, encouraging, patient. And no doubt sigh with relief once we are out of sight. One can never be too careful.
Mike was unusual in another respect: he didn’t use jargon or clichés. Agent Orange words. “Liquidity” and “transparency,” yes, but not “going forward,” “proactive,” “paradigm,” “incentivize,” “added value,” “comfort level,” “outside the box,” “a rising tide lifts all boats.” He didn’t even use “fungible,” a word that was enjoying a big vogue. So I ventured a last, offhand question. “What do you really think of derivatives?” Worth a try.
He quickened. “The mathematics can be awesome. You have to admire the mathematics. And they can be an excellent risk-management tool…” He trailed off, obviously wondering whether he should continue. “Well, it helps to look at derivatives like atoms. Split them one way and you have heat and energy—useful stuff. Split them another way, and you have a bomb. You have to understand the subtleties.”
Understand the subtleties. God is in the details. Cracks me up.
Moral Hazard - sad but uplifting, despairing but inspiring - punctures your heart and your head; the rare novel that is both touchy-feely and brainy intelligent. Jennings is economical and exacting with her language, which helps explain the book's brevity; yet her brevity is dense and intense. You wish the novel would be 5000 pages, not its mere 125, while you savor the book's story, its characters, its intelligence, its style. The words soar off the page, beckoning; its prose sings to the reader.
I had to discover more about Kate Jennings and her oeuvre. Regrettably she has published only two novels to date. I immediately read her first published novel, Snake. Though excellent, it pales in significance to Moral Hazard. Jennings has crafted Moral Hazard so brilliantly that - scene by scene, chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, word by word - the novel is spot-on perfect. Best novel published ever? Perhaps not. It is unreservedly one of the best books I have ever read. Moral Hazard is so phenomenally excellent I want to scream from the rooftops, "Read this novel!"
Please. You will be glad you did, your life enriched that much more.