Party Boy
by Breton Dukes

Is the midlife crisis the least fashionable of all the crises? Zadie Smith, in her essay ‘The Instrumentalist’, thinks so. Miranda July, in her novel All Fours, re-imagines the crisis as a wild, weird, and sexy one. Emily Perkins won the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2024 with Lioness, a story of middle-class, middle-aged awakening. In 1939 F. Scott Fitzgerald published an account of his own midlife crisis in the essay ‘The Crack-Up’, lamenting the ‘big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside’ and the other ‘sort of blow that comes from within … [when] you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.’ In Party Boy, Breton Dukes’s first novel-length work, protagonist Marco Siddle is about to turn fifty, and he’s not sure he was ever a good man. Cue midlife crisis.

Dukes, until now, has primarily written short stories. Much of his recent work hints at his trajectory towards Party Boy – a clarification of the question of parenthood, of fatherhood specifically. He’s been working in the space between fathers and their children, asking how we are failing our children, and how our children might redeem us. ‘Kid and the Tiger’ and ‘Nude Rabbit Run’ (published in Landfall 234 & 240) both include fathers nearing the edge of a psychological breakdown. ‘Ross Creek’ and ‘Malcolm’, from his collection What Sort of Man (2020), both tell a story from the point of view of a father in relation to his child.

A more recent story, ‘His Heart Is His Mouth’ (Landfall 246), sees Dukes pare narrative form down to its quick. It is a terrifying account of the overwhelming responsibility that can accompany the care of children. He has a script writer’s sense for escalation, choreography, and pacing, a craft honed on the short story form over many years. So why a novel? And why now?

Party Boy is what remains of a harrowing project. In 2022 Dukes interviewed ‘twenty-five or so old boys, from many different eras, of Otago Boys’ High School’. His intention was to explore and expose, ‘Bullying, homophobia, the culture of conformity, [and] violence’. ‘In the end’, writes Dukes in this novel’s acknowledgements, ‘it was all too grim’.

What follows is an apology of sorts. This is not the book he expected to write. When is it ever? This is not a ‘survivor’s’ story. Instead, sexual abuses and abhorrent bullying behaviours are present in the novel’s atmosphere. They pervade Marco’s psyche, make him nervous, guarded, and angry. Dukes invites the reader into the experience of a damaged, problematic man, one who proves a difficult character to inhabit.

Part One generates an atmosphere of intensifying paranoia. Marco, a husband, father, and short-order cook who is ‘loosely conscious of being older, of being white and hetero, of relying on his wife financially, of being basically insubstantial’ is struggling to keep up with orders in the kitchen. Sensory details describe Marco’s experience of the kitchen environment. ‘[T]he sound and the smell from the toastie machine was insistent’, ‘buzzing and controlled clattering as the squat little machine printed’, and ‘the vodka was ice cold, but the alcohol also gave good heat over the vermouth’.

Marco feels as though he is under enormous pressure. He confesses that ‘since taking tramadol he was more able to cope with the kids’ and was ‘less stroppy’ with wife Michelle. We learn of ‘the endless sickness [kids, three boys; eight, six, and four], him and Michelle not getting on, and then a few days ago this email from a man, Ren, who’d said he was researching—researching!—Marco’s old high school. Interested, he said, in the school’s culture of misogyny, homophobia, bullying and conformity’. Here are the echoes of the author’s project, but there is no time to dwell in the past. Marco must ‘Finish staff tea, make cheese balls, roll the arancini’, and ‘aioli—also make aioli’.

Dukes has a short story writer’s attention to detail, so when Marco fills a sink with boiling hot water, and the sink is made important by its naming, ‘Sink Lake’, the reader senses it will have future significance. Here is a writer who understands economy. There is no excess, no fat. Dukes’s prose is all lean muscle and sinew. It is simple, efficient, plain speaking, and true to the protagonist. By reducing sentences to their essence, he sometimes finds a folksy musicality. Listen to the rhythm: ‘And here now there they were. Covid free. In the car, its engine idling. Three faces across the back seat’.

Therapy sessions, in which Marco confesses incidents from his past, provide an opportunity to stray from the present timeline of the story. This structure offers Dukes the chance to write short narrative vignettes in a length and style reminiscent of his stories. One of these, in which Marco is nine years old, is a Dukesian classic. There are his short staccato sentences: ‘Marco swore. Then he was crying. Was Skeleton Nose still after him?’. There are specificity, escalation, tenderness and violence, dread and peril, as well as gallows humour. His dialogue always reads true. ‘He passed a horse pulling grass. “Hi horse,” he said’.

Each vignette could work on its own, but this is a novel. Marco’s experiences accumulate and eventually hold the emotional weight of the final party scene in Part Three. Without the chance to feel what Marco has felt, it would be easy to scoff, turn away, and dismiss the premise of the novel entirely. Party Boy asks if we have what Fitzgerald called a ‘first-rate intelligence’. Can we hold two opposing ideas and continue to function? Those two ideas are, one: Marco is a good man, and two: Marco has done terrible things.

There is a poetics of beautiful simplicity in Dukes’s sentences, especially when describing food. He can sound like a dandy. That aioli Marco made, it’s ‘a pastel yellow, pillowy aioli’. Or, he can sound thuggish. Those cheese balls he rolls are ‘big ugly gluggy fuckers made with a kilo of pre-grated Tasty, the same cream cheese, then crushed garlic, onion, parsley, salt, Worcester…’. Later on in the novel, at Marco’s much anticipated fiftieth birthday party, he grills ‘Meat Mountain’ while Kong, a friend and chef at work, prepares the salads. The description of food and its preparation suggest Anthony Bourdain:

Pastures of colour. Rounds of radish on blanched green beans, Chilean grapes black as pupils, tiny triangles of watermelon, pomegranate seeds—glistening garnets against the deep green of ribboned kale—segments of Gisborne orange, mint, dill, torn basil, little golden orbs the yellow heirloom tomatoes, smooth and glistening in contrast to the matte red raspberries, blackcurrants, iceberg lettuce, freshly shelled peas blanched for maybe eight seconds … and orbiting each salad a bespoke dressing.

Recently, a song by Loyle Carner, ‘Homerton’, stopped me cold. In the final moments a man in a gravelled speaking voice confesses over a fading piano melody, ‘My dad told me this one thing and it’s very true, he said, umm, sometimes, he said, umm, the parents need their kids more than the kids need their parents’. Breton Dukes understands this can be true, and in Party Boy, he invites you to experience how it can feel to be a father who needs his kids. Read the scene, my favourite, in which Marco transports his three boys home from school, and you decide how much they need him. But there can be no doubt that – by God – Marco needs those kids.