 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
A Private Man
By Malcolm Knox
Vintage $29.95
 Part of the line-up for the Byron Bay Writer's Festival (July 30-Aug 1), Malcolm Knox was the cricketing reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and is now its literary editor. He gained attention with his 2001 novel Summerland, a bitchy tale of young professionals whose moral capital fell far short of their assets.
This follow-up, set mostly on Sydney's North Shore, focuses on the hypocrisy and foibles of the Brand family whose head, John, a GP in his late 60s, has been found dead, apparently of heart failure. A few days after his passing, Chris, one of his three sons, is batting for the Australian Test team against the touring South Africans, struggling to save his once fabulous, now waning career. His innings, which eventually will top 300, is being watched on television by his doting, grief-stricken mother, Margaret, and brother Davis, a doctor like his late father.
Absent is the third brother, Hammett, neither a professional sportsman nor medico but a flourishing wholesaler of pornography.
So emerges an unsettling portrait of a family whose tastes and talents have driven them apart, except for the parental bond, regardless that the father is found to have become a fervent, secretive consumer of hardcore porn.
Dr Brand frequents adult shops and uses his laptop to trawl the Internet - 'he had heard that 'sex' was the most common word on the whole Web.' A favourite is American porn starlet, Kelli Kittering, prompting his son Hammett to call him an 'Idol stroke', explaining, "There are lots of strokes, Pa - I've seen them all, believe me, there ain't no stroke I don't know. There's nasty strokes, and there's Asian strokes, and he-she strokes, and fetish strokes, and kiddie strokes.
"Yours is the idol stroke. It's not uncommon. That's what the studios play on when they create this superstar thing. Some men get obsessed by particular actresses. But you, my own Pa, wow, I'd never have guessed, uh-huh."
Yet these are not the only secrets harboured by Knox's characters: after redeeming his reputation with a triple-century, Chris Brand joins team mates for group sex with female fans - a prescient parallel to the NRL scandals - while brother Davis harbours a secret crush on his GP locum and their mother has a similarly unsatisfactory relationship with a long-time admirer who offers support after her husband dies.
It's an eerie, intriguing tale of dishonesty that confirms Knox's reputation as an acute observer of Australian life.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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