Peter Carey

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Recognizing Jack

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SOURCE: "Recognizing Jack," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4613, August 30, 1991, p. 21.

[White is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic. Below, he favorably reviews The Tax Inspector.]

Peter Carey has an approach to the novel destined to make him one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English. His characters are well motivated but not all shade and nuance. Instead, they are drawn with a firm bounding line and they quickly leave an indelible mark on the memory. His language is straightforward but supple enough, semantically and syntactically, to be fully expressive. His plots unfold chronologically. There are no tedious post-modernist high jinks undermining the authority of the text. He has a strong sense of place—in this book [The Tax Inspector] a decaying garage like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Indeed, his visual sense, the novelist's most essential gift, is astonishingly clear; his people are never just voices nattering on in the dark, as is so often the case in commercial fiction. They are always well lit and about to do something strange and suitable.

The Tax Inspector (a title that makes one think of Gogol's The Government Inspector with its comic and religious overtones) is about the sudden appearance of a handsome Greek woman, Maria Takis, who has come to examine the fraudulent books of a family below reproach, the Catchprices. They own the moribund garage and automobile showroom in a no longer safe neighbourhood. Old Mrs Catchprice receives the Tax Inspector as though she were a long-lost daughter and never lets her get a word in. It turns out that Mrs Catchprice, the family matriarch, is the one who has denounced her children to the tax department because she fears they want to pack her off to an old people's home:

"Mrs Catchprice. Are you Mrs F. Catchprice?"

"Frieda," said Mrs Catchprice. "I've got the same name as the woman who was involved with D. H. Lawrence. She was a nasty piece of work."

"There's no other Mrs F. Catchprice in your family?"

"One's enough," she laughed. "You ask the kids."

"So you are the public office and also the one with the anomalies to report?"

"Me? Oh no, I don't think so." Mrs Catchprice folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.

"You didn't telephone the Taxation Office to say you were worried that your business had filed a false tax return?"

"You should talk to Cath and Howie. They're the ones with all the tricks up their sleeves. All this talk about being a professional musician is just bluff. She's an amateur. She couldn't make a living at it. No, no—what they want is to set up a motor business of their own, in competition to us. That's their plan—you mark my words. But when you look at the books, you take my word, you're going to find some hanky-panky. I won't lay charges, but they're going to have to pay it back."

Frieda Catchprice's husband is dead, her daughter is a middle-aged would-be Country and Western singer, one son is an urbane, successful lawyer and art collector, the other an erotomane and incompetent used-car salesman. The grandsons, however, are the real prizes—a bald, saffron-robed Hare Khrisna devotee named Vish who never stops mumbling prayers, and a psychotic blond sixteen-year-old who has taken assertiveness training ("Affirmations and actualizations") and who now believes he is an angel.

Carey's triumph is that he doesn't ever turn his eccentrics into grotesques. We experience everything so intimately from several points of view that we scarcely judge anyone at all, any more than we ordinarily judge ourselves in the usual moments of just being. This suspension of moral discrimination is brought to our appalled attention only at the end of the book; the climax makes us recognize that we've dangerously misplaced our sympathies.

Along the way we get a vivid picture of the make-up of contemporary Sydney. Maria Takis is a second-generation Greek who resents arrogant, nouveau riche Aussies and the shocking social inequities all around her. A Mafia leader intimidates or buys off everyone. Sarkis Alaverdian is an Armenian hairdresser who instantly sizes up Mrs Catchprice: "He could smell the meat-fat smell then, from that far away, the Aussie smell, as distinctive as their back yard clothes-lines with their frivolous flags of T-shirts, board shorts and frilly underwear, so different from Armenian washing which was big and practical—sheets, rugs, blankets, grey work trousers and cotton twill shirts."

Sarkis and the Catchprices live in Franklin, a Sydney suburb that was once beautiful countryside; now it is a burnt-out wasteland filled with murderous teenagers. Mrs Catchprice remembers an earlier, rural Australia, where, as the wild daughter of defeated parents, she had claimed her independence by walking out on them armed with sticks of dynamite carried about her person.

Her son Jack has escaped the burnt-out Franklin and family feuds to become a cultured, sensitive lawyer (all ironies intended). Jack meets Maria, the Tax Inspector, when she is pregnant and he is hungry for her baby. He wants to marry her so he can raise her child and he is far more attentive to her pre-natal care than she herself is. He is the sort of man, in any event, who drinks herbal tea from a raku teapot, whose designer house opens up to cabbage tree palms populated by lorikeets, who knows how to order a good Haut Brion—you know the type. Curiously enough, one really does feel one recognizes Jack.

His wealth troubles Maria. As she tells him, "I'm a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line?"

In an earlier novel, Bliss, and in his stories, The Fat Man in History, Carey explored urban blight, greed, youth, violence, ecological disaster. In Oscar and Lucinda, set in the nineteenth century, he created two mythic figures at once at odds with their fellow Australians and emblematic of their diversity and sheer stamina. Oscar and Lucinda and the earlier Illywhacker were national epics in the tradition of One Hundred Years of Solitude—dense with characters, breathlessly paced, visionary (who will ever forget the picture of a glass church floating up a river in Oscar and Lucinda?)

In The Tax Inspector, a shorter if no less ambitious book, Carey has rescored his big symphonies for a smaller, more articulate, crisper instrument—a harpsichord, say. In fact, if the novel made me think of Gogol's mixture of social satire and mysticism, it also reminded me of De Falla's eerie harpsichord concerto in which modern music is played on a classical instrument.

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