Duff: One Night Out Stealing

As in his debut novel, Once Were Warriors, New Zealand innovator Duff offers a gripping, gritty, vernacular portrait of the underside of his seemingly calm homeland. This is a world of tattooed criminals and pathetic dreamers who find false camaraderie in booze, bragging and sexual conquests. While Warriors-the novel, not the powerful but less political film-was seen as Duff's indictment of his fellow Maori, this book, as editor Vilsoni Hereniko notes, suggests that lost values are the product of class, not of ethnicity. Maori Sonny and pakeha (white) Jube have shared much-flats, crimes and a cell-but it is Sonny alone who makes the slow, sure pilgrimage toward conscience. In the course of the pair's trip from Auckland to Wellington, readers learn their histories and empathize with Sonny's anguish as he comes to recognize the ``social prison'' he was born into. From their burglars' booty, Sonny seizes on a video-of dancers from Soviet Georgia-that suggests a way for him to steal his life back. (New Zealand's poor may be less culturally estranged than their American counterparts.) Jube, however, sinks deeper into depravity, eventually forcing a fatal confrontation. Duff's urgent multi-perspective voice suggests Hubert Selby-an impressive, world-spanning inflection for Hawaii's series Talanoa: Contemporary Pacific Literature. (Dec.)