Vincent O’Sullivan

What Sort of Man by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press, 2020), 239pp., $30

Eight of the nine stories in Breton Dukes’ new collection ‘confront’ their readers with the frank demand of a title that could easily slip to an aggressive question: ‘What sort of man?’ You cannot help but think of Primo Levi’s similar question with his memoir, If This is a Man, or Sarah Helm’s history of Ravensbrück camp, If This is a Woman. It is not a title that is meant mildly to intrigue you. You know you are about to be challenged in various ways. You are going to be as far from Frank Sargeson’s coded male world, or Barry Crump’s blokish romps, or admirable mature behaviour, as New Zealand writing has so far gone. For the most part, these stories are rough, brutal, mean as pigshit, yet written with an artistic finesse that is, in itself, a celebration. Dukes’ fictional world, at first so starkly black and white, breaks down to just how complex that simplicity may be when attended to so finely. He takes us into the intricacies of male competitiveness, its rare promptings to what elsewhere might be taken for tenderness, the ineptness of a certain kind of man to draw much from the women he relates to, or to absorb the errors of his past. A world with few winners, with multiple losers.  [Read more…]