Moral Hazard

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