Pissants

I don't know that I can say that I exactly enjoyed ex-AFL player Brandon Jack's debut novel, Pissants, though certainly parts of it are very funny. Young straight men are the demographic with whom I've always felt least comfortable, and Pissants takes us into the heart of their territory, a world that Jack knows only too well, inside what he (and every football player, coach and commentator) calls 'the Four Walls,' the inner sanctum of the AFL club.

Pissants is kind of a novel, and Jack claims that it's fiction, but it reads as more like a series of linked short stories or vignettes in which the same group of characters recur. These are the marginal playing cohort, good enough to get onto an AFL list, not quite good enough to break into the team every week, their playing lives precarious, hostage to their own and others' injuries and form. This group often find themselves at a loose end, perhaps aware that trying harder isn't going to work a miracle, frittering away their days and nights in pointless drinking games and elaborate pranks.

Getting a glimpse into their world is definitely interesting, sometimes disturbing, occasionally very dark indeed. Helen Garner puts it well in her blurb: 'Under its foul-mouthed, laughing bravado lie deep wounds, a humble and endearing loneliness that moved me.' This is the Pissants paradox; though the boy/men move in a pack and grope for identity in each others' reflected presence, ultimately they are heart-breakingly separate from one another. Terrified to show vulnerability or make a genuine trusting connection, they swear and fart and text and hunt and drink and snort and kick and run, each in his own desperate bubble.

We are always being told how problematic masculinity can be. Pissants  is like an uncomfortable, entertaining textbook of how it can go so wrong.