From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire--and himself into an angel--the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.
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"The Tax Inspector is a major work in style and vision...[Carey is] in the prime of his creative life..." --The Montreal Gazette
"The sheer exuberance and heightened visual power of Mr. Carey's prose is, sentence by sentence, as brilliant and pleasurable as ever, no matter how dark his vision." --The Globe and Mail
"The Tax Inspector is a lurid, funny, gritty novel." --Jay McInerney
From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire--and himself into an angel--the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.
--
Praise
"The Tax Inspector is a major work in style and vision...[Carey is] in the prime of his creative life..." --The Montreal Gazette
"The sheer exuberance and heightened visual power of Mr. Carey's prose is, sentence by sentence, as brilliant and pleasurable as ever, no matter how dark his vision." --The Globe and Mail
"The Tax Inspector is a lurid, funny, gritty novel." --Jay McInerney
