Volume 39, Number 12 · June 25, 1992
House of Cards
By Robert Towers
The Tax Inspector
by Peter Carey
Knopf, 279 pp., $21.00
The Australian writer Peter Carey is little known in the US, although for the last few years he has been living in New York and teaching at New York University. His lack of following is as, mystifying as it is regrettable, since his novels contain scenes so powerfully visualized and characters so various in their eccentricity, willfulness, goodness, and depravity that it is hard not to mention Dickens or Balzac when one is writing about them. Carey has a wide readership in both his native Australia and in Britain, where his third novel, Oscar and Lucinda, won the Booker Prize in 1988. American readers are not likely to be put off by Carey's sexual frankness (and occasional scurrility) or by his taste for sudden violence. Can it be that they find something boring in reading about Australia, where (they may think) banal vestiges of a British colonial heritage coexist with a brainless Californian hedonism? Nothing could be further from the grotesque yet eerily familiar world of Carey's novel.
Review, 2712 words
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