Victor Billot on an author with a sense of reserve, perhaps control

2026-02-09 - 16:08

The gothic towers of Otago Boys High School sit high on the hill above central Dunedin. Etched above the stone gates is the patriotic motto, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The temperament and identity contained within that chilly slogan glowers across the city, and runs behind the pages of Breton Dukes’s new novel, Party Boy. I attended Logan Park High School across town. It had its share of louts but they were diluted by the loose co-ed atmosphere. It’s only in recent years that I’ve got to know Breton. We were introduced by our mutual friend, musician John Howell, co-leader of Dunedin band The Broken Heartbreakers. Like Breton, he is an OBHS Old Boy. Like Breton, John is a little obsessed about the effect of this institution on those who passed through its rough embrace. It was an immensely disturbing and enjoyable experience reading Party Boy. It was enjoyable because Breton is a great writer, and disturbing because of what he writes about. His previous three collections of short stories give a sense of his interests and themes as a writer. Excellent and well crafted as these are, they feel like practice runs for this, his debut novel. Part of the fascination comes from how Breton has drawn freely, liberally, and sometimes gleefully from his own life, from those around him, on the city he lives, works, and plays in. Main character Marco shares some characteristics with Breton. Like Marco, Breton has worked as a chef at a popular local bar, and he is a husband and father with three young sons. Of course, Breton is not Marco. But Marco is not unlike Breton. The novel is a story of the midlife disintegration and possibly redemption of A Man, a product of his times, of the kind I have known and still know, and of which Breton knows intimately better. Party Boy concludes with an epic 50th birthday party held by Marco. Much of the book is about the lead up to this event, interspersed with the history of a young Marco, the deep unresolved shames and horrors and crushings of his life, which is not an unusual life, which is in fact a normal life. That is where the book catches you. It probes and winkles and pushes until it finds some soft sensitive flesh to scratch its sharp point. Breton holds dinner parties on a regular basis. They are fairly much the only ones I get invited to. In Party Boy, Marco is in a state of inner frenzy. Gradually unspooling as the contradictions of his life press down on him. I have observed Breton for signs of inner frenzy. Hard to detect. Breton in person is anything but a flailing hot mess. He is low-key, with a sense of reserve, perhaps control, edged with a dry and sometimes sharp humour. He has a sort of natural sophistication, not of the phoney try hard variety, but what was once called a ‘man of the world’. Good lord. I can see his eyes bulge slightly as he reads that. He might even be suave. Academic? Pseudo–Intellectual? Trendy lefty? No. Breton is not a pontificator or armchair philosopher. He surrounds himself with chatterers, dreamboats, beatniks, and observes. On New Years Eve, I was raving to his wife Liz about the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I am an enthusiast – something of a shallow receptacle for the latest noise. Breton joined the conversation. He looked at me seriously. “I have absolutely no interest in any of that stuff,” he told me. He gestured around the room, at the conversations, the human interactions, the relationships. “That’s enough for me,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about his life or his writing, or perhaps both. His home environment is comfortable, down to earth, middle-class Dunedin. Liz is charming, smart, a highly qualified professional. Breton on the other hand has no career. He has jobs. His vocation is writing. A small bookshelf in the lounge is heavily populated with the works of Karl Ove Knausgård. Breton takes his dinner parties seriously. They are fun – absolutely great. But behind it all goes substantial planning. Like Marco, Breton takes food seriously, he takes hospitality and entertaining seriously. In his attention to detail, to craft, one could draw a long bow between the chef and the writer, balancing the ingredients, juggling on the edge of chaos, perhaps layering a cake, impressing his guests with an impressive yet seemingly effortless production, a complete show. But it would be wrong to describe his writing as good craft and leave it at that. The vehicle is a finely tuned beast, but the driver has an animus, and motive. He is heading into the hills, heading along the back roads as night comes down. Breton’s fiction has followed a path, not an exclusive one, but a general route through that enormous and still somehow strangely blank land of the male. We have heard a lot about these characters, probably far too much. But in 2026, literature (certainly in New Zealand) has transformed. The problematic male – the male coming up short (and the male who no longer reads fiction.) The male who still dominates incomes, society, economics, the wrong type of statistics, jails, health scares, the male who is quite justifiably identified as the source of much evil, or at least low level negativity. The male as a product of 21st century New Zealand, an urban society obsessed with a rural fantasy identity. A ‘man alone’ society with a smear of superficial post-neoliberal sophistication. Murder/suicides where you know the story before reading the details. Men who can’t decide to play the blood-splattered pig hunter, the smooth ‘sorted’ property investor, or the million-hit Tik Tok star. Men in their role as head of the family, provider, authority figure – all these zip up body suits that we once wore, but which are now finished, ill-fitting, covered in holes. Men making mistakes, doing bad things, trained to stuff emotions down inside like a black plastic bag of trash, and now sinking into a daze of misogyny, conspiracy, and self-loathing. Okay. Maybe it’s not all that bad. I missed some of the traditional hardline Kiwi masculine programming that Breton writes about. Perhaps I didn’t get tortured enough as a teenager. But this is a story of resolution, of becoming better, of facing the darkness. The men Breton writes about are now at the peak of their careers, wealth, power, at least those that survived and in some cases thrived. For those who didn’t make it, this book remembers. It is an account. It does not preach, glamorise or whitewash. It remembers. Party Boy by Breton Dukes (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to this tough, challenging novel. Monday: a revealing interview with the author, conducted by Justin Agluba. Tomorrow: an essay by Talia Marshall on Dunedin concepts of toxic masculinity.