Australia's Family Ties

By Paul Gray

THE TAX INSPECTOR

by Peter Carey

Knopf; 279 pages; $21

Few fictional families in recent memory seem more unhappy than the Catchprices, who own a General Motors dealership on the outskirts of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Gran Catchprice, the matriarch of this ragged clan, is approaching her 86th birthday and toys with the idea of blowing Catchprice Motors to smithereens; she has a stash of gelignite and knows how to use it. Her daughter Cathy wants to leave the family business and go on the road with Big Mack, her country-and-western band. Son Mort refuses to sell cars and enjoys a none-too-warm paternal bond with his own two teenage sons: Johnny, 18, has escaped to a Hare Krishna ashram in Sydney; Benny, 16, possesses, as Mort sees it, "severe learning difficulties and the belief he was a genius."

Actually Benny is a lot stranger than his father imagines. The boy has decided he is an ethereal spirit -- "Angel of Plagues, Angel of Ice, Angel of Lightning" -- and has had wings tattooed on his back. Benny also sees himself as the appointed savior of Catchprice Motors. Never mind that his relatives think him fit for nothing but pumping gas. "This is a family business," Benny tells a prospective salesman. "It's a snake-pit. They all hate each other. None of them can sell a car. If you work here, you'd have to work for me."

Into this happy workplace stumbles Maria Takis, eight months pregnant with the child of her former boss at the Australian Taxation Office. She is doing penance for her imprudent affair, and her punishment is to be assigned to investigate crummy outfits like Catchprice Motors. Maria is rapidly losing her illusions: "She knew already what she would find if she audited this business: little bits of crookedness, amateurish, easily found. The unpaid tax and the fines would then bankrupt the business."

The Tax Inspector records the four days this lamentable investigation takes, and during most of them, Australian-born Peter Carey is at the top of his form. Best known for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), an inspired account of a pair of star-crossed Victorian lovers, Carey specializes in comic compulsiveness, the obsessions that lonely people in underpopulated landscapes create to give some center to their lives. These fantasies seldom lead to anything but trouble and unexpected consequences. Gran Catchprice's desire to destroy what she and her late husband have built seems understandable, given her original expectations: "The only thing she had ever wanted was a flower farm, but what she got instead was the smell of rubber radiator hoses, fan belts, oil, grease, petrol vapor, cash flows, overdrafts and customers whose bills ran 90, 120 days past due. It was this she could not stand -- she did it to herself."

Along the way, though, a lot of the fun goes out of this tale of a maladroit family and hapless, unwilling tax inspector. There is a dark and extremely unamusing family secret that has made the Catchprices so miserable and so horrid to one another. What begins as slapstick evolves into tragedy, and Carey does not adequately prepare the ground for this transition. In the end, a reader is left with the uncomfortable sense of having laughed in all the wrong places. If that was Carey's intention, he succeeded, but he should perhaps expect only a muted form of gratitude.