Snake

Written in short epigrammatic chapters, Snake bores a deep hole into the secret lives of a miserable married couple who have entered into their nuptial arrangement out of conformity to superficial social mores and pressures, resulting in festering despair. Each chapter is like a trenchant poem and indeed it did not surprise me when I found out later that Jennings is an award-winning poet. The novel's title "Snake" seems to be a metaphor for the deranged, poisonous state people become seduced in when their desperate need for social acceptance compels them to capitulate to traditions and customs (in this case a marriage with all its false promises)and after the intoxication of the ceremony and public approval wears off they must face the sobering realization that they have joined union with someone completely incompatible with them. Jennings writes with scalding irony yet at the same time maintains love and compassion for her characters.

A short, concise tale of anger and rebellion by an intelligent but ignorant young woman who awakens very quickly to the fact that she has married in the worst way possible for her. She is available, every man knows this except her husband, who is too stary-eyed to see any truth about her. Highly recommended, can be read in a sitting.

The hand of the poet is evident in the elegant use of language to create tension and waste not a breath that would interfere with the stealthy creep of these characters' fate, until it breathes down their necks, and the moment of denouement is... that their lives are trivial, as are all of ours. The haunting loneliness of rural countryside, or loveless marriage, or friendless life, is evoked cumulatively in vignettes whose collage effect remains with the reader long after this slim and beautiful book is done.

This is one of those novels that makes you feel the texture of the language itself as powerfully as it evokes place and sensibility. Kate Jennings writes with the deftness and precision of a poet, but at the same time she brings a novelist's eye to the few elements with which she works, often un-obvious ones. Jennings knows what to depict and also what to leave out, or show in shadowy relief. It's a stirring book, and an important one.

In this very brief novel (157 pages), Kate Jennings paints a bleak portrait of a failed marriage. It is written in clipped, precise language which, like the barren land surrounding their farm in Australia, belies the content and struggle of their lives. Irene, the central character, marries Rex, a farmer, and enters a life she soon learns she despises. The story follows her through the birth of her two children, the various small activities of her life, to the dissolution of the marriage. And then the story ends. Written in brief vignettes (the book is divided into 77 chapters, some as short as a paragraph), the story's style seems to have more in common with poetry than prose. Each word in the novel is carefully chosen; like a poem, the chapters are tightly packed, as if all extraneous detail has been boiled off to leave the densest essence of the story. By the conclusion, although quickly reached, I felt as if I had woken from a potent dream.