Moral Hazard
A Novel
by Kate Jennings
List Price: $11.95
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0007154623
Publisher: Fourth Estate
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.
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Q: How did you begin your career in high finance? What did you like most about working on Wall Street? What did you like least? To what extent do you consider this novel autobiographical, if at all?
KJ: By accident. I was the last person you would expect to find in that environment. However, because I tend to be driven by curiosity, I loved learning about finance. And then there were the bankers themselves. Who knew that men in suits with thinning hair could have such complex personalities. All that juicy hypocrisy, boggling highhandedness, fabulous vainglory, amoral rationalizing, egregious forgetting, breathtaking fecklessness -- as a novelist I was salivating.
I wasn't keen on the corporate aspects -- meetings, hierarchies, team reviews. Corporate life seems brutal to me, but maybe you have to grow up in that world to be able to take it in your stride.
I write close to life -- not close to the facts but to the emotions. Sure, I worked on Wall Street for a time as a speechwriter. My husband died from Alzheimer's. But Moral Hazard is a novel. Invented characters, dialogue. Stylized reality. A fictional corporation, Niedecker Benecke. Niedecker after an obscure Southern poet that I admire, Lorine Niedecker. Benecke after Tex Beneke, who died around about the time I was making up the name. Hey, as soon as you start making things up, it's fiction. I have to say, the reality was more awful, more messy than the events in the book.
Q: In your author's note, you've recommended several books to readers who don't know much about finance. Why do you recommend these particular books? Do you think that someone who doesn't know what a hedge fund or derivative is, can fully understand the business dealings that occur in Moral Hazard?
KJ: Before I worked on Wall Street, I used to blank on anything to do with finance. Yet it's not so difficult to grasp -- the math is hard but the general principles aren't. And the shenanigans of bankers affect us all -- we would do well to pay closer attention, educate ourselves. Of the books I recommend, Martin Mayer's are probably the most accessible. He's a wonderfully lucid writer.
Q: Could you describe any research you may have done about Alzheimer's?
KJ: There are any number of books out there. The Alzheimer's Association can provide direction and support, as can the Well Spouse Foundation.
I am continually dismayed by the way families are catapulted into coping with Alzheimer's without any guidance. Doctors give the diagnosis and then let the families go home to fend for themselves. The families need educating. The physical and emotional aspects of the disease are awful. Add to that a medical system that turns its back on chronic long-term illnesses. My husband and I had terrific doctors -- we were lucky. I'm also resourceful -- I got the phone numbers of some of the research doctors, for example, and called them in their laboratories.
Last week, the Bush administration directed Medicare to pay for treatments associated with Alzheimer's -- a big breakthrough. The cockeyed reasoning for not paying for them up until now was that Alzheimer's patients don't get better. Given the situation with Medicare, most caregivers had no option but to get their loved one onto Medicaid and into a nursing home, whether that was appropriate or not. However, we are a long way from providing the kind of enlightened care common in other Western countries.
Q: Of Moral Hazard, you've said that you "set out to write an intense confrontational novel about mortality and morality". In what way do you consider this novel confrontational?
KJ: The narrator, Cath, is an unsentimental and often cranky person. She calls things as she sees them, whether it's the immorality of bankers, society's irresponsibility toward the chronically ill and the aging, or the lack of rigor in her own moral stances. In her straightforwardness, she is confrontational. She'd probably be a difficult person to know -- she's a bit reckless in what she reveals. But at least she has a sense of humor about herself -- that's her saving grace. She is someone learning the hard way not to be impatient and judgmental.
Q: When and how did you become an author? Could you talk a bit about the writing process for Moral Hazard? What books and/or authors have influenced you most? Are you working on any new projects?
KJ: My mother was a frustrated writer. As was the case with so many mothers of her generation, she handed on her ambition to me. I became a poet. In fact, when I started Snake, I intended to write a poem, but it wasn't working. I had been reading Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, a short novel in which the prose is so devastatingly exact that the voice that comes through is shocking in its purity. I thought that I might try something like that -- except all points of view would be represented.
And now I'm hooked on short novels. I'm really interested to see what can be done with the form -- how adamantine it can be made. I always used to say that if I had my druthers, I'd go back to being a poet, but that's no longer true.
How do I write? I'm always boiling down my prose as I go along, as if I were making a stock for a sauce. Loose language and inaccurate metaphors annoy the dickens out of me. I write the beginning and then the end -- eventually the two meet. The bridge-building approach to writing fiction. Sauces and bridges -- mixing my metaphors.
Influences? I teethed on Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes. Along with Jamaica Kincaid, I admire JM Coetzee, Philip Roth, Richard Powers, Les Murray, Shirley Hazzard, Alice Munro, Henry Green, Molly Keane, Elizabeth Bowen, Wallace Stevens, ee cummings, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. I mustn't neglect to mention Bill James. I'm wild about his Harpur and Iles mysteries -- I've just read all 17 of them. Marvelously idiosyncratic. He's got an extremely well developed sense of the ridiculous. And he writes short. Love him.
Q: Do you consider yourself a New Yorker? What do you like and not like about living in New York? In what ways do you feel that the city has changed since you moved here from Australia twenty years ago?
KJ: After 22 years, I guess you could say I'm a New Yorker. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else. I don't dislike anything about the city, except perhaps the dense, polluted heat in summer. Because I don't cook, I especially appreciate all the take-out food stores and restaurants. Foraging for food is easy in New York!
In the book, Bailey says that every block is a movie, and that couldn't be truer. You never use up New York City. There's always another layer to peel.
I arrived in the seventies, when the city was ragged, unkempt, unsafe. That's changed. On the downside, housing costs have gone through the roof. I got a decent-sized apartment in Hell's Kitchen for $200 a month when I first arrived. That same apartment would cost $3000 a month now.
Q: There's been a bit of recent controversy about the city of New York selecting a book for all New Yorkers to read, along the lines of the city-wide "book club" instituted in Chicago. Would you describe Moral Hazard as a 'New York' novel?
KJ: One of my aims in writing Moral Hazard was to convey what it was like not just to live in this city but to work in it. Most NYC novels are written by twenty-somethings and are about clubs, love affairs, drugs. I wanted this to be a book about adults, navigating adult concerns in a city that is, paradoxically, both generous and unforgiving in spirit.
Of course, adult concerns are not the exclusive domain of New Yorkers. End-of-life issues and the burdens of caregivers are universal. We all face hard choices at some point in our lives, and we do the best we can. As for the vexations of office life, they are the same no matter where we live.
Excerpted from Moral Hazard © Copyright 2008 by Kate Jennings. Reprinted with permission by Fourth Estate. All rights reserved.
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