One of Australia’s best writers

The one for whom we had the greatest hopes.
Your writing, dense with allusion, led us

To anticipate that you would be our Joyce,
Nabokov, Borges. Looking back I would venture

We were perhaps too easily impressed
By your learning, ours being a country

Where the word mandarin only means
Orange. Or a necklace …

In the same poem, she writes:

Men have learned not to despise ambition
In the female sex, but it finds an expression:

Empty eyes, fingers that must be held back
to shudder …

She told me that Australians of a certain generation would rather refer to “tragic lives” than denounce alcoholism. But calling it herself, she felt that having caught the disease from her cohorts, she would have died with them if she hadn’t left Australia and got sober in New York City by the end of the years. 70.

There she married American photographer and graphic designer Bob Cato, famous for the legendary album cover art of Dylan, Miles Davis, George Harrison, The Band and Johnny Cash, among others.

An optimistic man, her husband was the most supportive person she had ever known. “He taught me not to growl,” she explained. It was the writing that pulled her through the heartbreaking agony of her descent into Alzheimer’s disease and ultimately her death. What emerged from this pain was perhaps the pinnacle of his career, the slim semi-autobiographical novel Moral hazard.

In the Moral hazard reading notes, she wrote: “I was shuttling, it seemed, between two forms of dementia, two circles of hell … This is a novel about both terminal illness and moral illness; about an individual’s memory loss and society’s forgetting about the things that really matter.

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“Cath is forced to take a job as a speechwriter for a large financial firm in New York City when her husband Bailey is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in order to fund her increasingly expensive need for treatment and palliative care. As she immerses herself in two worlds of madness, she struggles to keep her own fragmented existence together. The lack of morality she witnesses in her workplace echoes the lack of empathy she witnesses … [the] health care system … “

Internationally, the book was considered one of the novels of the year. When I put this on him Moral hazard was, in my opinion, one of the greatest Australian novels of the previous half century, she asked if Australia had the maturity to claim and embrace something whose only connection to Australia was the nationality of its author , a nationality that was, in his case, now shared. As long as her words hung in the air, it was as if she dared the whole country to kiss him.

For those book club members who have a disproportionate voice in the choice of their colleagues’ books, why not resist the tyranny of the new and step into the splendor of Moral hazard? Kate Jennings was a self-proclaimed troublemaker, revolutionary woman and Australian. She was also one of the best writers of her generation.

Elliot Perlman is the author of The street sweeper and, more recently, Maybe the horse will talk.