The Tax Inspector

The Tax Inspector

First edition cover
Author Peter Carey
Country Australia
Language English
Publisher University of Queensland Press
Publication date
1991
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Preceded by Oscar and Lucinda
Followed by The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

The Tax Inspector is a 1991 novel by Australian writer Peter Carey.

Plot summary

The setting for most of the novel "is Catchprice Motors, a terminally run-down used car business founded by Frieda Catchprice in the Forties but now resembling nothing more than a 'badly tended family grave'. The Catchprices live in Franklin, New South Wales, which used to be a country town twenty miles from Sydney: since then Sydney has swollen out of recognition (it's now the second biggest city in the world, after Calcutta), and suddenly Franklin finds itself only two miles along the F4 from the outermost suburbs. Responsibility for running the business rests mainly with Frieda’s daughter Cathy, a rather miserably aspiring Country and Western singer, and her sleazeball husband Howie, who sports a pencil-thin moustache and 'a secret rash which stopped in a clean line at his collar and the cuffs of his shirt'. Cathy's brother Mort is a more sporadic presence, while the other brother, Jack, has taken the wisest course of all and left Franklin for good: even if, as he sometimes admits to himself, all his best endeavours can never rescue him from being 'a Catchprice – damaged, compromised, expedient'."[1]

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