Rachel Cooke's shelf lifeFiction This article is more than 7 years oldTony and Susan: the powerfully strange novel behind Nocturnal Animals
This article is more than 7 years oldRachel CookeAustin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan is a coolly terrifying, cleverly crafted portrait of revenge... and is now out in cinemas
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.
Wright’s tone is ever cool and calm, as if Patricia Highsmith were taking a vivaIt 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.
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