Kate Jennings (1) (1948–2021)

A most intelligent book about working on Wall St in speechwriting. Quieter than highly recommended "Bond Girl", Cath is struggling with the endorsements of crap she has to pump out and also with the onset of Alzheimers in her much older husband. Tragedies, both, but the soul selling means very little in comparison to the loss of her beloved after only ten good years.

"All around us, impossible sums of money were heaped on people who were no more deserving of it than any other kind of show more professional." And that's mild!

The descent of Cath's husband Bailey into dementia is somewhat mitigated by the strong friendship of Mike, a risk manager, who schools Cath at the beginning of her tenure and helps her to become an adept student of mediocre Wall St managers.

Most painful is her terrible experience at a hardly disguised St. Vincent's Hospital, where the DNR on Bailey and Cath's wishes are brutally disregarded. I do believe this is a truthful tale and oh so vividly and beautifully written. And it would a way better movie than that idiotic "Blue Jasmine". show less

In her recent writing, Kate Jennings has established a persona who acknowledges her Australian origins but is a literary New Yorker to her bootstraps. This book is a memoir dealing with two dogs she acquired soon after her husband died in similar circumstances to the husband of the heroine of her novel Moral Hazard. There's a clue on how to read it in an early chapter, where she recalls trying to persuade her elderly father to get a puppy, threatening to have someone dump one on his show more doorstep, and he astonishes her by weeping.

I would remember times when he was in great distress, but never tears.
'What's wrong, Dad?'
'I had to shoot all my dogs, and I never want to do that again.'
I absorbed this remark, the shock of those tears. When conversation takes a serious turn, Australians throw vats of boiling, spitting oil over one another in the form of humor [sic]. They are not denying their emotions; they are obliterating them. 'Dad,' I said, 'I think this time it'll be the other way around. The dogs are going to have to shoot you.'

The memoir is full of facts about border terriers, enough to make most people resolve to have as little to do with them as possible. It drops in references to many writers: Thomas Mann (German) and Joe Ackerley (English) loom large, and Bob Dylan offers a surprisingly sweet comment about Old Yeller. There is copious Newyorkana, interrupted by an excursion to Bali. Four people told me the book was so slight as to be hardly worth reading, and I almost took them at their word. Having read it, I couldn't agree less. It may be light. It may go on about the cuteness of dogs and (in Bali) monkeys. It may never come right out with effusive expressions of grief or inspirational Kubler-Ross stages. But it tackles exactly the difficulty with serious emotion named in the quote above, and makes it look easy. A cranky review once described another of Kate's books as a kind of ode. This book, too, is a kind of ode: light, spare, witty, poised, allowing hard emotion to well up from the depths. Kate would never have been so crude as to use this metaphor, but her scruffy border terriers, ratters from way back, burrow down into a dark hole in her Riverina stoicism and New York cool and bring back rich, direct heartfelt emotion. show less

A very difficult novella to describe and review. It's told in short chapters, some a mere half-page long and tells the story - such as it is - of the marriage of two dissimilar people in the Australian outback after World War II. It's not a happy union, a fact that is perhaps most evident in the sections told from the perspective of the couple's two children. Nothing good happens. Nothing much happens at all, really. But the writing is mesmerizing; if that were not so, this would be show more instantly forgettable.

3.5 stars show less

Australian-bred New Yorker Kate Jennings, picked by Black Inc to give us a Quarterly Essay on the recent US election and the global financial crisis leavens her account with plenty of apparent irrelevancies (a bawdy punchline from a Don Rickles show, an excellent anecdote about post 9/11 airport security, delicious bits of lunch-time chat). As Quarterly Essays go, this is one of the least earnest and least controversial. Where Judith Brett's account of the 2007 Australian election was a show more careful analysis of John w Howard's departure from the Prime Ministry, this is more a celebratory recount of Barack Obama's final sprint to victory, played in counterpoint to the unfolding GFC (as in Global Financial Crisis). Kate may be a stroppy feminist poet and dog lover, but she served time as a speech writer on Wall Street (and wrote about it in [Moral Hazard]), so has a sharp insider–outsider perspective that makes for lively reading. I don't know that I understand the economics of it all any better for having read the essay, but I'm grateful for her weighing in with judgement and an un-mealy mouth. I've come away from it with the mental equivalent of a stimulated palate and a pleasantly full stomach.

Only 90 of the book's 132 pages are taken up with the eponymous essay. The rest is correspondence about Tim Flannery's call to action in climate change in the previous issue. Interestingly, no space is given to denialists, so the effect is of passionately engaged conversation rather than the lobbing of shonky grenades that sometimes passes for public debate on this subject. You have to look fairly hard to discover the name of Quarterly Essay's editor. His name is Chris Feik. He does a bloody good job, at all levels show less