Tony, Susan, Arnold, Edward and Jill

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think this is a three and a half starred book. Interesting, but it falls away in the last third. What I did like about it is that this is a book about the porous boundaries of reading. Susan receives an unpublished book in the mail from her first husband, Edward - whom she hasn't seen in 20 years (his second wife sends her an Xmas card each year). Susan had an affair with the man who became her second husband. Things ended badly between Susan and Edward. Things aren't so great with her new husband Arnold, who is away at a conference.

As the reader, we experience Susan reading Edward's narrative - which is a thriller, along with her thoughts about their relationship, her thoughts about her current marriage, and the impending arrival of Edward in her home town. So there's layers on layers here - which is what makes the book interesting. I was reading, being consious of my own life, my readerly reactions, Susan's life, and then the very lively plot within a plot. As the Guardian reviewer says: "Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there." He also said "if Tony & Susan can be said to be about anything other than its exploration of form, it is about the failure to be an agent in your own life."

This review also provides a description of the author, now deceased "He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: "You. Are. Invented." "

The book went out of print but was resuscitated by a publisher who thought it had been neglected. It has been billed as "the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road" but it's not in the same league as Revolutionary Road in my view. You might be interested in this less than complimentary view of Tony & Susan - in which the reviewer reveals the worst sentence in the book - a funny sentence about Arnold's penis and the trouble it causes.

I liked the layered stories and the sense of anxiety the writer creates as we wait for Susan's current husband to return home, for resolution of the internal story which has a kidnap and revenge as its focus and whether Edward will step beyond his writing into Susan's story. Is his narrative a form of revenge?



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