Muck
A Memoir
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Mordantly true to life.”—J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
With their only son on the brink of adolescence, the nouveaux-riches Sherbornes move away from the city to start a new, gentrified existence on a three-hundred-acre farm—or “estate”—in Taonga, New Zealand. But life on the farm is anything but wholesome. Sherborne evokes his family’s slide into madness through a series of unforgettable, hilarious portraits: of “Feet,” his once-glamorous mother, now addled with snobbery, paranoia, and mental illness; of “The Duke,” his uncomprehending, sporadically violent father; and of himself, the “Lord Muck” of the title, at once helpless victim and ruthless agent of their undoing, who in the end must decide whether he can save his family.
Clear-sighted, lyrical, and marvelously funny, Muck has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. It is a heartrending memoir of family discord and an exquisite story of a young artist in search of a self.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
