What is supposed to give Tony and Susan its depth is the fact that, running in parallel with the traditional thriller featuring Tony, we have a more subtle thriller involving Susan as she reads the book. Count on it, he knows.’īut these agonies don’t strike me as being especially novel or groundbreaking. I’d like them to be shown exactly what it was they did.’ Elements of Tony’s psychology are nicely drawn, such as his tendency to a sort of protective neuroticism (“It was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate”), his guilt as a victim (“Boy, how could you let them do that to you?” says a man whose house he goes to for help), and his very human confusion at what he wants to happen to the bad guys and why he wants it. That is not to say that the book is without interest even Nocturnal Animals has its moments. (Which is not to say that suspense fiction and thrillers can’t be done well, as the likes of Patricia Highsmith or Eric Ambler have shown.) So my strong dislike of the opening scenes of Nocturnal Animals fatally undermined the rest of Tony and Susan for me.

I don’t tend to that view, feeling instead that this sort of pulp-by-numbers is not even a guilty pleasure but a waste of time and that if an author can’t rely on a reader’s sustained interest without placing characters’ lives in peril to create suspense, then he shouldn’t bother. If this sort of thing appeals to you, then it’s likely that the whole book will build on this (because the whole is more complex than this) and find favour.

Immediately we are thrown into a violent thriller, complete with renegade cop, revenge dilemmas and climactic shootout. It has an explosive opening, where a ‘good’ family make a chance night-time encounter on a deserted highway with a bunch of bad guys who try to run them off the road. Nocturnal Animals is not a very good book. This, for me, was where the problems began. After a few pages to set up this framing device, we are plunged into the novel-within-the-novel, which takes all but about a hundred pages of Tony and Susan‘s 375-page length. The novel, Nocturnal Animals, has been written by Susan’s ex, Edward, and sent to her in manuscript form. Tony and Susan describes a woman – Susan – reading a novel about a man named Tony, and we also get the full text of the novel. It’s a wild claim for a book which disappointed me almost from the start. And, “the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road,” says the publisher’s website. High praise has come from almost all quarters, including several friends of this blog.

The book remains out of print in the US other than as an ebook, but Atlantic Books in the UK have taken the (I think) unprecedented step of reissuing it in hardback. It was first published in the USA in 1993, arrived in the UK straight into paperback the following year, and was quickly forgotten. Someone has high hopes for Tony and Susan.

Austin wright books