SOURCE: "Recognizing Jack," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4613, August 30, 1991, p. 21.

White is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic. Below, he favorably reviews The Tax Inspector.

Peter Carey has an approach to the novel destined to make him one of the most widely read and admired writers working in English. His characters are well motivated but not all shade and nuance. Instead, they are drawn with a firm bounding line and they quickly leave an indelible mark on the memory. His language is straightforward but supple enough, semantically and syntactically, to be fully expressive. His plots unfold chronologically. There are no tedious post-modernist high jinks undermining the authority of the text. He has a strong sense of place—in this book [The Tax Inspector] a decaying garage like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Indeed, his visual sense, the novelist's most essential gift, is astonishingly...