Moral Dilemmas Surface After Fate Takes a Bad Turn

MORAL HAZARD

A Novel

By Kate Jennings

Fourth Estate

180 pages, $21.95

“Cath. That’s my name. At the time of the events I am recounting, I was in my forties: bedrock feminist, unreconstructed left-winger.... [My beliefs] were not so much unexamined as untested. You can guess them: affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose, a judicious redistribution of wealth, parity for everyone in all things.” This crisp self-presentation, in the opening pages of Kate Jennings’ deftly titled new work, “Moral Hazard,” flags the topic about to unfold: the testing of one woman’s staked-out, firmly held set of principles.

We never learn Cath’s last name, nor much about her life prior to “the events,” save that like author Jennings, Cath hails from Australia, moved to New York and has worked successfully as a freelance journalist. Cath is also lately and happily married to a gentle-spirited artist named Bailey.

“Twenty-five years older than me, imprudent as I, but who cared? He saw the point of me.... He surrounded me with warmth.” The reader is trusted to fill in the blank past: 40-odd years of conscious privilege, brimming with stimuli, low on pain. Emblematic, perhaps, of the reader’s own class and time. And if so, it is all the more frightening to see this familiar world torn in two, its tent poles and fabric destroyed in the few seconds it takes for a pen-fiddling neurologist to sigh: “You will have to say good-bye to the man you love.” This could happen to us.

Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, “gaga, away with the pixies.... “ Those are all aliases for the random, baleful blow of fate that has struck Bailey, the beloved and loving husband. Alzheimer’s strikes even harder at Cath, or so she seems to feel as the shared ordeal drags on and deepens. From a certain point onward his panic will blur and evaporate along with memory; she must accompany her man’s unraveling with eyes wide open.

Faced with geometrically mounting medical costs, Cath quickly hires a nurse’s aide and signs on to a 9-to-5 job with benefits, as a speechwriter for execs of a Wall Street private investment bank. “Niedecker Benecke.... You will know it: not quite top tier.” (This cognoscente’s “you will know,” apropos of some utter fiction, is one of the narrator’s less appealing mannerisms, along with “dear reader” and a penchant for emphatic italics.) To play mouthpiece for the bosses ranks as a first giant step toward ethical meltdown, at least for any woman bold enough, as Cath is, to equate American corporations per se with “Nazi-occupied France, the Vichy government.... In corporations there are out-and-out collaborators. Opportunists. Born that way. But most of the employees are like the French in the forties.... Hunkering down. Turning a blind eye.”

Given Bailey’s situation, Cath understandably grants herself absolution. However, a practical hazard remains: her sheer cluelessness about finance, market economics, statistics--all that stuff she’s expected to eloquently represent. To the rescue comes a disaffected risk analyst. Cath and Mike share extended “ciggie breaks.” “Beanpole Mike, angular and awkward as Abe Lincoln” and a potential romantic entanglement, gladly plays Virgil, a guide through the Hades of high finance. They’re wonderfully matched: Expert Mike is as prone to pages-long, righteous fulminations as is Cath, the eager learner. Quickly and early, the narrative’s balance, as measured by word count, tips away from Bailey’s poignant down-spiral, and toward yet another brittle and sarcastic sendup of blinkered corporate perfidy.

Heads up, class! Whip out your PDAs and styluses and define the following concepts: 1) hedge fund; 2) financial derivative; 3) convergency trading. Drawing a blank? That could be because these terms, though central to the spare and linear plot of “Moral Hazard,” are never adequately defined. Instead we have an author’s note: “For readers unfamiliar with finance and wanting to know more than a short novel can bear, I recommend.... “ Poor compensation. Surely the book could have been leavened with a handful of rough, robust definitions, without incurring accusations of verbosity.

Cath keeps her emotions on a tight leash. “I’d rather eat garden worms than be earnest or serious. Or sentimental.” Hard-edged minimalism delivers real pathos in the scenes devoted to Bailey, through the sheer horror of his disease and of the even greater “moral hazard” Cath confronts in his plight.

But where character development and background are throttled, motivation suffers. The reader can only guess why Mike’s vehement opinions seesaw, what prompts Cath’s periodic bouts of “sucking-up,” why Mike eventually plumps for vindictive silence and who poor Bailey was in better days. Presented without family or real friends, the couple appears oddly marooned. And the cadre of bosses, while often amusing, comprises mere cartoons.

The fall through the trapdoor of fate. The parallel construction of private moral hazard unfolding in tandem with free-market turpitude. Reference to an actual ‘90s hedge fund comeuppance--altogether, an intriguing premise for a novel. “Moral Hazard” reads as its promising draft.