SOURCE: "House of Cards," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 39, No. 12, June 25, 1992, pp. 35-6.

Towers was an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review, he surveys Carey's previous novels and remarks favorably on The Tax Inspector, praising the novel's arresting prose and elaborate yet coherent structure.

The Australian writer Peter Carey is little known in the US, although for the last few years he has been living in New York and teaching at New York University. His lack of following is as mystifying as it is regrettable, since his novels contain scenes so powerfully visualized and characters so various in their eccentricity, willfulness, goodness, and depravity that it is hard not to mention Dickens or Balzac when one is writing about them. Carey has a wide readership in both his native Australia and in Britain, where his third novel, Oscar and Lucinda, won the...