Novels, like butterflies, have momentous, too brief lives. They come, they’re reviewed (or not), and then they go. Only a few enjoy an afterlife. One that did make a fluttering kind of comeback was Tony and Susan by Austin Wright (right). When it was first published in the US in 1993, it wasn’t much of a hit, for all that it was praised by, among others, Saul Bellow. In 2010, however, it was republished in the UK, courtesy of an enthusiastic editor, and for a while, a few bookish types were talking about it. Now, five years later, Tom Ford has made it into a movie called Nocturnal Animals.
I haven’t seen the film yet, but I read the novel in 2010 on holiday in Italy. The fact that I can remember this – not only the hotel, but the location of the sun lounger on which I was lying at the time – says everything.
It is a powerfully strange book, at once very simple yet hugely complicated. Its main theme, at first sight, is revenge, but in the end, I read it as story about the power of stories, their ability to mess with our heads.
In Tony and Susan, a woman called Susan Morrow is spooked by the manuscript of her ex-husband’s first book, Nocturnal Animals. But we don’t have to take Wright’s word for this: so are we. What a nasty, violent tale it is.
When it begins, Tony Hastings, a maths professor, is driving his family to their summer house in Maine. All is cosy until, in the middle of the night, the Hastings are accosted by three men in a truck. One of the men climbs into the car with Tony’s wife, Laura, and his daughter, Helen, and takes off; the other two men drive Tony to a clearing.
What happens next is calamitous, though Wright’s tone is ever cool and calm, as if Patricia Highsmith were taking a viva (Wright was professor of English at the University of Cincinnati). But there is also something dubious about Tony, a corollary of Susan’s latent anxiety both about her ex-husband, and her current marriage to a philanderer called Arnold.
As good as Ford’s film may be, I strongly recommend Tony and Susan. The novel comes with its own particular queasiness, the sense that words really can kill.
