Muck: A Memoir

This Australian poet and playwright focuses on his severely dysfunctional family from the perspective of a self-centered teenage boy with a penchant for sarcasm, dark humor, and meanness. The author's aggressive angst is largely isolated to a farm in New Zealand that houses a snobbish mother's paranoia, a blowhard father's weaknesses, and the kid narrator's self-conscious approach to life. His father instilled in him a distrust of the uneducated "Gunna – the man who is "gunna do this, gunna be that…" and it shows in Sherborne's interactions with locals. "Norman and Bill may have knowledge, but it's cow knowledge, hardly knowledge in the real sense," he says. Occasionally Sherborne allows his poetry to rise to the surface, as in descriptions of his father's gaze from a Sydney balcony: "And all the yachts that sail there only sail with his permission. All the fish must trespass out of sight below the surface." Sherborne's bleak moral emerges when a favored calf expires from over-imbibing in milk: it's all muck. (June)