Ash Davida Jane
Max by Avi Duckor-Jones (Affirm Press, 2024), 298pp, $38
Max, the first full-length novel from Avi Duckor-Jones, follows an eighteen-year-old boy on the verge of adulthood as he’s forced to reckon with the parts of himself he’s shut away. Set in an unspecified North Island city, the novel follows a four-act structure with a familiar coming-of-age narrative journey. Part One ends with the night of the big end-of-school party, which acts as the catalyst for Max’s life coming apart and, ultimately, his transformation.
At the beginning of the novel, Max is struggling to accept his sexuality, let alone articulate it to anyone else. Having presented a particular version of himself to his school friends, his adoptive parents and his teachers, he’s afraid to shed his facade and find something inherently bad underneath. Max is a well-formed character, and we spend a lot of time with his internal dialogue. With the novel written in the first person, we’re fully submerged in Max’s feelings, which are often dramatic and all-consuming. The prose is full of imagery in a way that is useful to convey the weight of his emotions and the angst of being an unhappy adolescent but occasionally feels overwrought or overly exaggerated.
Despite this, Max is charming and easy to like, both for the reader and the other characters in the novel’s world. Duckor-Jones is conscious of and interested in exploring his main character’s privilege in the world as a young Pākehā man growing up in a middle-class family. He seems to breeze through school, his teachers and fellow students are all fond of him, and his adoptive parents appear almost too understanding. In comparison, Max’s best friend Fletch is Māori and Samoan, belongs to a large family, and gets up at 3am to work at a bakery before school to help support the family. Fletch lives in a different world from Max, and both characters are aware of it. Fletch is often in trouble at school or missing it completely: ‘He was good, he wanted to do good, but sometimes he just couldn’t play by rules that weren’t made with him in mind.’
The dynamic between Max and Fletch is the novel’s real strength: it feels entirely true to life. The way Duckor-Jones describes their interactions and mannerisms around each other feels familiar and easy. Max is enamoured with Fletch and easily hurt when his friend doesn’t include him in any part of his life. They’re very comfortable with each other, their conversations full of banter, but they don’t often delve under the surface.
Max idolises Fletch in a way that makes him seem superhuman—a familiar dynamic for a closeted queer teenager and their best friend: ‘He’s better than us, who all play by the rules … As always, he is entirely free and although I envy him, I love him for it, completely.’ Though Fletch’s cool facade slips occasionally, there’s a lot that’s left unsaid. In the few brief moments in the novel where we get an insight into Fletch’s real life, we get glimpses of another compelling character and the other side of this dynamic.
Throughout the novel, the recurring motif of cliff landscapes is a manifestation of Max’s emotional state and sense of self. These cliff scenes appear occasionally between chapters, typically as a single paragraph that either describes the cliffs themselves or depicts the landscape around them. We’re told these descriptions are of what Max sees in his dreams, and they’re fairly unsubtle. For example, when he’s in the depths of a depressive episode in part two, the image in the adjacent cliffs segment is of a shipwreck: ‘Inside the ship are platforms of rust, and light pierces through the corroded gaps in thin lines. Seagulls have made nests in its frame and there is the thick smell of rotting seaweed and bird shit.’ At times this visual cue of Max’s state of mind feels unnecessary, as we’re already privy to all of his thoughts and feelings. However, the cliffs provide an interesting perspective of how he views himself.
These cliffs also symbolise the sense of belonging to a place that Max doesn’t have and desperately longs for. When he swims or surfs with Fletch along the coastline that Fletch’s whakapapa is connected to, land and water that’s ‘in his bones’, Max feels the stark difference between them. Adopted as an infant and having no connection to either of his birth parents, Max isn’t tethered to any place. He knows nothing of his family history. This drives the narrative in the second half of the book as he travels to meet first his birth mother and then his birth father.
As characters, Max’s birth parents appear almost as caricatures of neglectful artist parents. Both washed-up creatives, his mum is a singer in New York past the prime of her career, surrounded by fellow narcissists and reminiscing on the glamour of her more successful years. His dad is a bitter and lonely middle-aged man, often drunk, clinging to the one scrap of success he had as a visual artist. Neither character is particularly empathetic, and despite Max not finding the connection or understanding he was seeking with either of them, the circumstances around these visits have a bigger impact on him.
In New York, Max stays with his adoptive mother’s late uncle’s partner, Busby, a lovely older gay man who serves as a mentor figure for Max. Everyone needs someone like Busby in their life, though his assertion that ‘everyone’s gay now’ feels a little out of touch. We’re never told the specific year in which Max is set, but early on we see that dial-up internet is still the norm. Based on what we learn later about how old Max was when his mother’s different albums came out, we can extrapolate that he’s eighteen in 1999—not exactly the prime time of gay rights and acceptance in New Zealand or the United States. This comment reads more as a reflection of how disconnected Busby is from his old home in Aotearoa, living as he is in a bubble of white gay men in New York City, but it’s still an odd response to a young man feeling as much fear and self-hatred as Max is about his sexuality. Still, Busby is another character who feels well-formed and comes alive on the page, providing a lifeline for Max in a time of uncertainty.
The journeys Max takes in the second half of the novel are driven by the catalyst of two events that happen on the same night. One of these is a rough sexual encounter with an older man at a hotel while Max is drunk and upset. The novel isn’t explicit about what happens in this scene, but it’s clear that it’s not fully consensual: ‘Whether this is what he wants or what I want is murky.’ The shame and disgust Max feels throws him into a deep depression. As we’re viewing the events through Max’s eyes, they remain murky throughout the novel, only briefly addressed when he tells Busby about what happened. He insists the events were his fault because he ‘let him keep going, even when [he] didn’t want to anymore’, and because a part of him sought it out. The novel treats this issue delicately, but it’s discomfiting. There is something unsatisfying about how Max doesn’t fully distinguish between his uncomfortable feelings about being gay (or queer, or bisexual—he doesn’t settle on a particular label) and his response to a traumatic sexual experience. I wanted more for Max. I wanted someone to help him process his fear and revulsion around this event, while acknowledging that it’s completely separate from his questions about his sexuality. If the event’s role in the novel is to complicate his emotional journey, I’m not fully convinced that Max can reach any kind of self-acceptance without these feelings being untangled.
With the narrative revolving so heavily around the three questions of Max’s sexuality, his birth parents, and his friendship with Fletch, it would have been possible for Duckor-Jones to wrap it up fairly neatly at the end. Instead, we’re left not knowing what will happen next, except that it will probably still be messy and emotional, just in new ways. There is some sense of closure, but a lot of questions are left unanswered. This feels right for Max’s character, still tentative and undeveloped at eighteen. Duckor-Jones gives us an insight into the raw, difficult emotions of a young man disconnected from his life and his sense of self. In real life, these big issues aren’t resolved over the course of a few months, so the ending of Max feels genuine in its openness.
Max is a well-paced coming-of-age novel from the perspective of a Pākehā New Zealander. With a sympathetic narrator and rich, emotive prose, Duckor-Jones draws the reader in. While the imagery feels a little blunt or overexaggerated at times, his depictions of emotional turmoil on the verge of adulthood are raw and engaging, and stronger still is the portrayal of genuine friendship between young men.
ASH DAVIDA JANE is a poet, editor and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
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