Thom Conroy
Party Boy by Breton Dukes (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 320pp, $38
A useful starting point for any review is to ask yourself what you think the author hoped an audience would take away from their book. Where did they anticipate you would feel urgency or emotional release? Who, by implication, does a writer think you are? To borrow a phrase from the American critic Wayne Booth, what sort of ‘literary friendship’ does the text look to make with me? As soon as we start talking about friendships, we’re in the social realm, and as soon as we’ve crossed this threshold, we’re talking about ethics, that branch of thinking concerned with human behaviour. For me, then, both the writing and the reading of fiction come down to an inherently ethical arrangement: what does the text ask of me, and what am I asking in return?
Party Boy by Breton Dukes is a novel of redemption. We open with the protagonist, 49-year-old Marco Siddle, cheffing in the kitchen of an Ōtepoti Dunedin restaurant. During the course of the opening 40-page scene, Marco’s booze and Tramadol kick in and begin to degrade his performance. As the orders add up and the arancini fall into the deep fryer, we’re shown glimpses of Marco’s backstory: a brew of toxic masculinity and trauma. After being suspended from his cheffing job without pay, our protagonist spends the middle portion of the novel going about his demanding domestic duties as a father to three young boys and making three visits to his counsellor, Neil. During each visit with Neil, the author switches to a very close third person to narrate three significant stories from Marco’s past. Each story is the confession of a crime or misdemeanour from an era where human connections are ‘pathetic’ and homoerotic violence is normalised, especially at Otago Boys’ High School.
In his Landfall Tauraka review of Dukes’s short-story collection What Sort of Man (2020), Vincent O’Sullivan wrote, ‘these stories are rough, brutal, mean as pigshit, yet written with an artistic finesse that is, in itself, a celebration’. This strikes me as a precise description of the language in Party Boy. In sentences that clot and contort syntax with the intensity of short fiction, Dukes’s first-person voice is entirely his own, and it’s at its strongest when conveying Marco’s thinking in real time: ‘Grunting, joggling Eddie higher, he kept at it. Angry at the track. Who made it so steep? At whatever little snot machine gave Eddie the cold. Michelle. At her and Richard. He stopped, trying to position Eddie better. His back hurt. His leg hurt. Pain’s part of it. Who’d said that? Someone from his rugby days … a skinny vice-captain they called Pig—after jugs at the clubrooms one night, Pig spewed into his locking partner’s mouth.’ (Ellipsis in the original.)
Despite sometimes squashing lines into distracting Yoda-like quips—‘Awesome it was’; ‘Fifty he was’—the language in Party Boy is consistently fresh, sometimes off-putting, and often elegant: ‘At the fridge, he removed Gorgonzola, Taleggio, truffle-infused Gruyere, Brie. Removed the different papers they came dressed in and shaped them off against each other on a green platter. Round ones. Ones with sharp noses. A paddock of pale-coloured cows.’
Structurally, Party Boy is an ambitious assembly. The novel consists of five more or less stand-alone narratives: the opening scene at the restaurant, the three third-person pieces shared with Neil, and the 100-page final scene of Marco’s fiftieth birthday party. These five narratives are encased in a stream-of-consciousness present that sometimes feels like packaging around the stand-alone narratives.
As a reader who hungers for new approaches to structure, I appreciate the experiment, and I’d love to say that it came off without a hitch. At the risk of making a predictable criticism, I have to say that this novel seemed closer to an artful repackaging of a handful of short stories than to a coherent novel in which every part contributed to a balanced narrative. Scenes such as Marco’s fiftieth birthday party stretched on indulgently, while details in other scenes—the excessive geographical data and the unrelated details about the music teacher’s office across the corridor from Neil’s office—spun me right out of the story. Interestingly, it’s worth considering whether a less innovative style, fewer structural experiments, and a single point of view might have rendered these surpluses invisible within the more familiar undertaking of a unified and conventional consciousness.
Thematically, Party Boy asks that we invest in a narrative arc that follows the transformation of the protagonist, Marco Siddle, from a morally compromised to a morally redeemed character. Placing a character like Marco at the centre of the novel is a courageous choice. At best, he is a likeable antihero who has committed a series of heinous, if culturally accepted, acts of violence.
Fortunately, the novel does offer an alternative moral perspective in the minor character of Ren. To avoid spoilers, I’ll be intentionally vague and say that Ren is a man whose cousin died as a result of past violence at Otago Boys’ High School. In each section break of the novel, Ren sends notes to Marco asking him for information about his time at high school as part of research he’s doing for a ‘think piece’, presumably about institutionally sanctioned violence at OBHS. Ren, as a second-hand victim of the violence that characterised Marco’s youth, serves as the conscience of Party Boy. When he shows up in person at Marco’s birthday party, then, this gives Dukes a chance for the moral showdown that I, as a reader, was keenly anticipating.
To raise the stakes of this showdown, Dukes makes it clear how much Marco craves praise and how much he resists atonement. These two impulses put added pressure on the authenticity of his contrition: if he’s confessing past wrongs for reasons that have mostly to do with admiration or social acceptance, and if he wants to get his contrition done and dusted without much fuss, it becomes harder for us to believe in the redemption that follows. As an invested reader, I thought this raising of the stakes might turn out to be an intentional set-up, a heightening of urgency for the blockbuster condemnation that surely awaits Marco.
We know that praise and recognition are important to Marco, as he expresses his desire for both throughout the novel. In an imagined response to the food he’s preparing for his birthday party, for instance, Marco considers ‘the praise he was already anticipating’: ‘Wine matched with great food. The perfect playlist. And, Hey, look, Marco’s bringing out the single malt, and, Wow, this is actual Champagne! Might be as they were leaving, he’d hear them say to Michelle, A real keeper you’ve got here!’ Just before the climactic moment of his fiftieth birthday speech, we see Marco wishing that his redemption didn’t require so much labour. When one of his former schoolmates performs an energetic dance, Ren comments, ‘God’. In response to Ren’s comment, Marco wishes that his friend’s ‘show’ would be sufficient to heal the trauma that has prompted Ren to research his ‘think piece’ on violence: ‘Marco held his hands out, like the show was his idea, like he’d arranged it to make the man, Ren, feel better. Like shouldn’t he now be off the hook?’ This thought demonstrates how little Marco hopes it will take to let him off the hook. To my surprise, he turns out not to be too far from the truth.
The mode of the three stand-alone third-person narratives shared with Neil during Marco’s counselling sessions is confession, and this mode is also meant to signal genuine remorse. Accordingly, each time Marco shares one of the disturbing incidents from his past, he sheds tears. For me as a reader, however, three expressions of contrition do not a redemption make. Perhaps sensing this readerly response, Dukes saves Marco’s most dramatic confession for the climactic scene: a speech in which Marco delivers a graphic (if incomplete) confession of past violence.
The birthday speech provides Dukes with an opportunity for Marco’s reckoning. Ren, who is present at the party and presumably carrying serious trauma over the violence perpetrated on his cousin, Graeme Sanderson, seems like the perfect moral foil to Marco’s self-pity and dubious contrition. What happens instead was, for me, an inexplicable ethical reversal, in which Marco comes out redeemed and the violence against Graeme Sanderson is submerged in a Hollywood-style group chant of the victim’s name—‘Graeme Sanderson’—that appears somehow to purge Marco of all culpability? After I read this scene, I was thrown off, confused, until I returned to that baseline question: what does this author expect of me?
Upon reflection, I recalled a term from the essay ‘Reading Teaches Us Empathy and Other Fictions’ by the critic Elaine Castillo, published in her 2022 book How to Read Now: Essays. In this essay, Castillo introduces the term ‘the unexpected reader’ to name those readers—often marginalised people or people of colour—whom a text simply cannot account for. When I thought about the unexpected reader, it occurred to me that, for Party Boy, this reader might actually be me—I was never a popular teen, nor did I attend a boys’ school, nor was I a member of an all-male sports team. Perhaps against the novel’s wishes, the character I most identified with in Party Boy was Ren.
While Graeme Sanderson becomes the symbolic victim of institutionalised male violence, the novel makes it clear that he was only one of countless others: ‘It wasn’t only Graeme. Plenty of other boys didn’t make it.’ Yes, I thought as I read this line, I too knew the ones who didn’t make it—in fact, it wouldn’t have taken much for me to be counted among their number.
After Marco’s history of violence is submerged—or perhaps swallowed—by the text, he projectile vomits, undergoes a symbolic baptism in the shower, and is miraculously redeemed by the creation of an exquisite four-tier pavlova. Marco’s final act in creating his pavlova is to anoint himself, and almost everyone present, with powdered sugar: ‘Marco hit that sieve like a spirit healer, he hit the sieve and he powdered them all, all except Ren, who remained in a deep sleep at the end of the table.’ Tellingly, only Ren is omitted from the blessing of the ‘spirit healer’. The novel’s conscience, then, is left unblessed and sleeping at its conclusion.
As I say, I may be the unexpected reader for Party Boy, but I found myself simply unwilling to accept Marco’s redemption. What I yearned for was a more costly personal reckoning, or, perhaps more convincingly, a failed grasp at redemption. The bit of narrative I found myself most wishing to read, in fact, was the ‘think piece’ that Ren never manages to write: that account of past violence in which uncomfortable details are shared. But Ren never has the chance to pen a word. Instead, he’s left in a ‘deep sleep’ where, presumably, the violence of the past will remain uninterrogated except by its perpetrators.
Intriguingly, it seems as if Dukes may have originally set out to write a version of the novel that comes closer to Ren’s think piece. Speaking in the acknowledgements of the ‘twenty-five or so old boys, from many eras, of Otago Boys’ High School, that [he] interviewed in 2022,’ Dukes writes: ‘Most likely this is not the book you imagined. Research-wise, I got as far as those interviews and reading every school magazine dating back to the 1960s. Bullying, homophobia, the culture of conformity, violence at the hostel—in the end it was all too grim.’
It sounds like a grim story, I agree, but maybe one that we need to read. It is this abandoned book, perhaps, that I expected to encounter in Party Boy—a book that might turn out to be agonising or uncomfortable, true, but no less important for that. Party Boy is a masterfully written novel that opens a contemporary critical conversation about institutionalised male violence in Aotearoa. Starting such a conversation may be the hardest step in what I imagine will be a very long journey.
THOM CONROY is the author of the novels The Salted Air and The Naturalist (both published by Penguin Random House), and he edited the essay collection Home (published by Massey University Press). He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University and Chief Editor of the journal Headland.
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