Snake

by Kate Jennings

Praised for its mesmerizing intensity and taut, quick-witted prose, SNAKE tells the mesmerizing story of a mismatched couple -- Irene, ambitious and man-crazy, and her quiet, adoring, responsible husband, Rex -- who tumble into marriage and settle as newlyweds on a remote Australian farm. It is amid this unforgiving landscape that Irene and Rex raise their two children. It is here that, as Rex bears silent witness, Irene tends her garden and wrestles with what seems to be her fate. And it is here that their marriage unravels -- inexorably, bitterly, spectacularly.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Australia, Novella, Literary Fiction

157 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Kate Jennings was a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Both her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has won the ALS Gold Medal, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Adelaide Festival fiction prize. Born in rural New South Wales, she has lived in New York since 1979.

Her most recent books are Stanley and Sophie, Quarterly Essay 32: American Revolution and Trouble: Evolution of a Radical.

Reviews

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 4 out of 5]

4★
“Irene was under the spell of music that was strutting, silky, optimistic, in thrall to smoky-voiced singers and innuendo-laced lyrics. Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, they were the snake charmers and Irene the snake.”

Rural Australia in the 1950s-60s is not a place for the likes of Irene. But somehow, she got hitched up with Rex, a farmer, which meant her life was pretty well mapped out for her.

This novel is almost a collection of linked stories which are easy to follow. The author draws clear pictures of the family. First is Rex.

Part One, “Poor Devil” is written in second person to Rex, opening with this.

“Everybody likes you. A good man.

Decent. But disappointed. Who wouldn't be? That wife. Those children.

Your wife. You love and cherish her. You like to watch her unobserved, through a window, across a road or a paddock, as if you were a stranger and knew nothing about her. You admire her springy hair, slow smile, muscled legs, confident bearing. If this woman were your wife, your chest would swell with pride.

She is your wife, she despises you. The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant. She emasculates you with the sure blade of her contempt. The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days.”

The second and third parts are written in the more usual third person and cover their childhoods, the years of their marriage, their children, and their frustrations. Irene veers from silence all day to verbal abuse at night. Eventually, Rex will break.

“At the top of his voice, he informed her that he was not asking much. All he wanted was to harvest his crops, care for his animals, share it all with a good woman.

Mostly, though, he just stood there, arms dangling. ‘Have a heart, Irene,’ he would say. ‘Have a heart.’”

No such luck. Their kids, known as Girlie and Boy, have their own troubled childhoods, as coached by their mother. The family does have some happy family times, but mostly it’s a story of mis-matches and pleasure-seeking on Irene’s part.

At the wedding, Irene’s older sister and maid of honour made her own observations, “deciding that Irene was in for a comeuppance. Rex was a nice enough chap but about as interesting as a month of rainy Sundays. Irene will be bored with him before they arrive at the Blue Mountains guesthouse for their honeymoon.”

Irene is indeed antsy and itching for excitement and bright lights. She didn’t intend to be this way. She just is.

“She hardly understood what was happening. She woke determined to be cheerful, but by the middle of the day some small thing plunged her into a fury… Irene's moods filled the house; there was no escaping. “

The various short chapters are vignettes of life that don’t seem as complete as they actually are. Put together, I can see these people whole and wish I could ease their circumstances. I’m sure everyone has met mis-matched couples and families with children that don’t seem to fit.

These are memorable people, none of whom I would wish to meet but all of whom I have met in the past in one form or another. I can understand their reactions to their situation, but I don’t have to like them for it.

Jennings is remarkable. It’s a short and powerful novel, Australian to the core, but echoing with the universal frustration of discontented women who think they deserve more.

[Irene Sauman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an example of how much can be said in so few words. It is black and compelling and humorous. It resonated. I grew up during this period in this countryside. The landscape, the life, it's all there. The characters are well drawn and understood though not always likeable, certainly Irene is not. One can only wonder at the life Boy and his sister made for themselves after such a beginning. I don't know what else I can say. It's a five star read.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published 15 years ago, Snake depicts a disastrous post-war marriage in the backblocks of rural Australia. Among the notable blurbers is Shirley Hazzard who declares it ‘irresistibly good’ and indeed it is.

It is painfully terse, particularly in Parts I and IV. Only 153 pages long, this novella is structured in four parts, beginning with a sardonic address to the lame-duck husband of Irene. It’s not his wife talking to him, but it’s someone who knows his failings well. He’s a ‘nice’ guy, but dull, under-educated and inarticulate. Incapable of registering his wife’s frustrations with life, much less do anything about them, he’s disappointed and lonely in the face of her contempt.

The second person narrative works well:

She is your wife, she despises you. The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant. She emasculates you with the pure blade of her contempt. The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days.

She passes on the loathing she feels for you to the children, solemnly, as if it were an heirloom. (p3)
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book. Jennings has the ability to create pared down yet beautiful scenes, and I found myself re-reading numerous passages where she deftly succeeded in creating the most exquisite imagery using such simple words. I found myself wondering how she'd done it as she managed to transport me to a world so very different from my own.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this short little novel in brief chapters. Jennings is a poet first, and that poetry comes through in full force in this wonderful story about life on an Australian farm.

[Dana Pepcak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an underrated Australian author!
Kate Jennings’ writing is incredible.

[Maha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic in its simplicity.
Evocative, profound, undeniably Australian…
I couldn’t put it down.

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This chick is good

[Booksy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Jennings is an Australian poet, essayist short-story writer and a novelist. I read her essays before and always wanted to read more from her. This novel struck me as truly original: original in form, in character depiction and in a way the writer approached the story line. Despite the bleakness of a story, the books leaves a feeling of enlightenment.

All chapters in this small and word-scarce book are extremely short and present snippets from lives of main characters - a family of rural New South Wales farmers and their children in the years after World War II. Every such snippet is a like a teaser: just when you are surprised and excited by a new turn in the narrative, the chapter finishes living you puzzled, eager to read more, and intrigued and somewhat deceived.
The chapter titles are often obscure and sent me on the search for their meaning (which I am still looking for), some are from Australian folklore, some are poetry excerpts, but most of them left me guessing.
I definitely recommend Kate Jennings for those readers who are interested in contemporary Australian prose, as she is undoubtedly one of the best. I will be looking forward to read her other novel – “Moral Hazard”.

[Michele Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is not said is easily more important than what is in this poetic novella. Each chapter evoking the reader's imagination so that tension within and around each character is uneasily absorbed by the reader. An album of verbal snapshots, telling an uncomfortable tale of a one-sided marriage, a make-shift family at best. Snake left me wanting more and grieving, but for what, I'm still not sure.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I think I liked this book more the second time around.

[Angie Fehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

*POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING: This novella incorporates themes of abortion and suicide.

Australian housewife Irene has for some time grown to feel that she's become uncomfortably locked into a seriously stifled domestic existence. Though she can't deny her husband has proven to be a good and faithful man, she misses the more wild, carefree side of her spirit that got consumed somewhere along the path of marriage and motherhood.

Irene makes it clear she likes her son but seems to be easily annoyed by her daughter. "Boy" is often light-hearted about life, enamored with American country music, while "Girlie" has a very serious nature, a writer spirit who tends to interpret things in their most literal sense. She's not much appreciated by either adults or fellow children.

Irene and Rex have a pretty good bond in the early years, but begin to show signs of slowly drifting apart over time as the children grow up. Along with decreased affections, tensions steadily rise between them. Whispers of infidelity begin to surface. Irene's coldness towards her daughter also increases while parent-child boundaries between her and her son become uncomfortably blurred. (WHY are they having tub time together in his teenage years?!!)

Finally hitting her limit with everything one day, Irene rather heartlessly decides to leave a letter confessional addressed to husband Rex out in the open --- where anyone might stumble upon it --- in which she admits that the son he helped raise all these years was actually fathered by her ex! The unraveling of the relationship from that point of confession continues to drive the narrative to its headshaker of an ending.

Snake is a quick novella read with alternating POVS: Part 1 is presented in second person voice, observing Rex; Parts 2 & 3 are in third person observing both Irene and Rex as a couple, while also offering perspective from Billie, an Army friend of Irene's who also served as one of her bridesmaids. Billie gives the reader details on Irene's pre-Rex promiscuous years, history that might play into why she was the way she was with Rex years later; Part 4 goes back to second person voice, but with the voice now focusing on Irene.

I won't lie, this one was a weird little read. It's gritty and stark, the descriptions of bleak Australian landscape often serving as an extra character to enhance the dark mood between our human players. The plot is grim but the writing itself is fascinating, bringing the reader into full-on rubbernecker mode til the very end. I didn't always entirely understand how some scenes connected to the plot as a whole and in the later bits of the story there seemed to be a strange fixation on bugs and mice that also left me scratching my head a bit.

In some ways, Snake reminds me of my reading of Nabokov's Lolita. Maybe not a story you'd return to often because it's so cozy and good... both books will undoubtedly induce a good skin crawl or two .... but you stay with the pages because THAT WRITING THO. Though an author might lead you down some dark, sketchy paths, a reader can't but be taken with a finely woven sentence (or hundreds of pages of them!). This is one such book. Take it for a spin at least once just for the sheer experience of quality "less is more" writing craft.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paired with The Plains by Gerald Murnane

By sheer coincidence these were back to back reading. They are both Australian classics, both set in rural Australia, written around the same time, and both are short. In the case of The Plains, mercifully so, and even then, I couldn't make myself get to more than half way through. In my defence, this is my third Murnane and I fully intend to read right through the increasingly-unlikely-to-be Nobel-prize-winning oeuvre of this exceedingly retiring writer. The Plains is an academic exercise, cool-clever, aloof, reminding me so much of Calvino that it makes me think if I ever were to reread that much-loved-writer-of-my-youth, I'd be repelled, not just by him, but by my young self. Snake is everything that The Plains isn't. To the point, gripping and warm, visceral where The Plains is cerebral. The main characters of Snake could be anybody, sad people with sad lives, struggling to make the best of things until they don't.

Then again, if that sounds a bit dreary, this is how the NLA describes Snake:

Set against the hard landscape of postwar Australia and moving through the 1950s and 1960s, Snake starts with a premise as frightening and common-place as the deadly bush snake that lurks in the Australian interior: The loyal Rex, a good man, cherishes his wife Irene. Irene, bubbling over with feminine anger and unspecified desire, despises Rex. Into this marriage, this terrible emptiness, two people pour their very lives. Snake is about the loneliness of men married to unkind women, about the unloved becoming unlovable. Irene - an Australian Madame Bovary - moves through these pages like a force of nature. Chapter by brief chapter, Snake tells her story with archetypal force and subtlety - and a mesmerizing, zero-at-the-bone simplicity that literally propels the reader to the novel's stark climax.

While Murnane is still alive, Jennings died at an age we probably think of as young these days. Because she wrote for her living, her actual literary output is tiny, alas. I would wonder why Snake does not merit a wiki page except that her own page does not even mention her notable work on Obama and the fall of Wall St, a book-sized Quarterly Essay which is still on sale in Australia and lies somewhere in my to read pile.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to writer Erik Jensen, ‘Snake is the great Australian novel.’ A largely autobiographical account of life on a drought-stricken farm in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Snake (1996) is both powerful and evocative. But Jensen is wrong. Its 145-page text interspersed with much blank space makes Snake a poetic novella.

Each of its four parts – lonely husband and his childhood; marriage to a more privileged wife; the harshness of rural life; departure from the farm – comprises chronologically organised yet discontinuous chapters so short I’m reminded of Lydia Davis, with typically cryptic headings like ‘PSEUDONAJA TEXTILIS TEXTILIS’, ‘STICKS AND STONES AND WALLABY BONES’, ‘A JAR IN TENNESSEE’ and so on, often borrowed from the poems of others including Philip Levine, Wallace Stevens and Les Murray.

Jennings, too, was a poet, and it shows: Snake is a stellar example of why ‘less is more’; a masterclass in the eloquence of what is left unsaid. Her second and last novella, Moral Hazard, which I’ve read twice, is likewise compressed, if longer. Having now read them both, I look forward to reading her short fiction, essays and poems.

[Tina Tamman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim volume reminds me of my thoughts about poetry. I admire poetry, often find the words a poet has chosen indescribably apt, effective, occasionally beautiful as well, but there is not enough in it to sustain me, provide food for my thoughts. Poetry is just too brief, elusive for me. As is this book.
That said, I admire it greatly. Kate Jennings has beautifully structured it into tiny chapters, each of them with its own (somewhat cynical) heading. Her writing is full of wonderful phrases, sometimes whole sentences that I wish I had written. It's fantastic to sum up a woman's thoughts of a man (and during a church service, too) as a safe-cracker might view a safe. But I am troubled by the novel's unhappy undercurrent which for me confirms the picture I have in my head of Australia: it's a dusty place with plenty of creepy crawlies and worse.
Hard to feel anything for people whom I but dimly visualise and frankly don't care about.

[Kristin Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

This book is short, to the point, and tragic. It follows Irene and her family. Irene is a woman who at some point was happy where her life was headed, until she wasn't. She is hard to please, never happy, and is a negative influence on everyone. This book mostly talks about her marriage failing and how her attitude on life shapes her.

The author is an award winning Poet. You can tell with her prose. Her writing is beautiful, delicate, yet deep. There's dry humor sprinkled in, and lifelike characters. I feel like she did a lot with this book considering how small it is. However, some scenes I wish were longer.

Lot of hidden symbolism in this book and suicide/abortion is mentioned in passing.

[Geoff Winestock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story about a bad marriage is one of the best evocations of a NSW country town I have read. It is about a smart woman married to a dull farmer guy back in the 50s and 60s when it was even harder for women to escape than now. Their kids are confused and want to get out too. There is no romanticised evocation of landscape or the weather or the joys of the bush. But there is a mouse plague. The author just died. I had read Moral Hazard about her time on Wall Street. This is better.

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

A master study in the active voice. Sparse on extraneous detail. Light on dialogue, echoing the silence led by the main character, Rex. I liked it more for the structure than for the actual story, though that was also good. Incredibly quick read. Got through it in under 4 hours. Possibly less but I was trying to watch the Olympics in between.

[Cheryl Lawrance · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great little read. In beautifully written short chapters the author captures effectively the experience of a woman living in the post war Australian outback. The atmosphere of small town life and the challenges facing both women and men in a harsh and challenging environment in the context of morphing social roles is captured brilliantly.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favourite, nor a book I would continue to read willingly, but nonetheless a book I will have to study in the coming year. I can’t say I hated it, but it was dry. Perhaps just not what I was expecting or hoping for. Many underlying themes were explored, much of which I feel I will not be able to understand unless I read it many more times

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and fierce episodic novel by a writer also known as a gifted poet. The scenes/vignettes/chapters are beautifully distilled and anchored often in mood. The result is a pitiless lyric portrait of a rural Australian marriage where landscape, weather, and post-war middle-class norms thwart every attempt at passion. An unblinking book. And gorgeously written.

[Jillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her writing is stunning - incredibly evocative - but this book feels like a series of notebook entries and I felt little empathy for any of the characters. I think they were sketches rather than fully drawn out people. I will read a later book in the hope she was able to write a more substantial story.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

stunning and sparse, a bit of a world war era madame binary, the woman who is stuck in a world that offers little but dreams of so much more, of a husband too simple to understand her needs. this was incredibly quick to plow through yet the sort of thing you could easily linger on. a drama of humans being humans, wanting what humans want, making the mistakes humans make, being imperfect and real.

[koriiii · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love these types of books - short little snapshots of bad people. i love the lack of character development traded for straightforward descriptions of fact. nice, easy & sometimes cringy. irene was a terror and i loved her.

[Sally Piper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparse and poetic, this slim novel is bursting with insight and nuance about the consequences of ambitions unfulfilled, with the Australian landscape providing a menacing but vivid backdrop to the characters' unravelling lives.

[Santino · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning novel(la)-in-flash.

[N · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short story with incredibly pared down prose. Enjoyed the use of second-person. But honestly felt like I just didn't get it.

[Oanh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spare and affecting.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! - extremely beautifully written, not too arty farty just a pure delight to read.

[Susanna Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minimalist but so meaningful, a bit like the characters. The Australian countryside and farm life perfectly rendered. Loved it.