While there are moments when Edward’s novel is fast paced and evocative, the rest of the novel is as colorless and cowardly as Tony is. Tony and Susan fights for an identity, for some clear point of view that will support the author’s thesis. from Edward’s novel and the disjointed, rushing language that is supposed to depict Tony’s disorientation during and after the hijacking incident, Wright muddies the waters. With passages like It was important to recognize the importance of things, for he knew now that everything important was important, nothing was more important than importance. He fails to give Tony, Susan, Edward, or Arnold more than a glancing touch with his narrative brush. Wright’s twisted sentences are like a corridor of mirrors that reflect endlessly without coming near the real thing, the people who cast the reflections. Arnold, Susan’s husband, seems to be an arrogant jerk, and she does not know whether she should have stayed married to Edward, ineffectual and colorless Edward. She has a lovely home, beautiful and talented children, and a husband who cheats on Susan as he cheated on his first wife with her.

Susan is a bored housewife of a successful man. His distance from his brother in Chicago is more than a symptom it is the fundamental truth of his life.

Tony is useless, an automaton going through the motions of a happy life without ever being truly happy or reveling in the joys and togetherness of family. He says all the right things and appears shell-shocked in the aftermath of discovering their bodies, but their deaths fail to touch a fundamental core response. The protagonist in Edward’s novel is an academic, a pale and cold man whose grief over the rape and murder of his wife and daughter barely skim the surface of his existence. Susan is unsure why she left Edward and remarried, choosing to blind herself to the truth, and Edward, in his own way, is telling Susan he was ineffective and could not or would not fight for her until it was too late. In what seems to be a treatise on modern marriage and selfishness, Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan is a study in contrast and futility.

Is there more to the story or is Susan reading too much into it? Susan, a little at loose ends with her husband in New York at a conference, reads the manuscript and is caught up in Tony’s dilemma. 'Ī story within a story that fails to deliver more than passing interest.Įdward, Susan’s first husband, has sent her his novel, Nocturnal Animals, to read before he comes to visit.

Tony and susan