Ian Wedde has reached an age where - well, he's not often asked for ID in liquor stores. He's got 20-plus books of poetry, fiction and essays behind him. And as this engaging novella shows, language still delights and ignites him.
The typically demotic title introduces three world-soiled siblings, children of a dangerously attractive and totally untrustworthy refugee from Nazism who's credited with making New Zealand aware of real coffee and really modern buildings.
Each gets a turn to talk to us, starting with Mick in his inner-city of tinnie house, pub mates and racing results. He's the tenant of his Dad's funny red square house, from which he stumbles out into descending stages of disintegration.
Then comes Veronica, managing to save someone else's life, but not her tour company or her marriage, trying to decide what makes people worth preserving. We end with Sandy, academic of sorts, seducer of sorts, in spite of his "autumn body", looking with equal disenchantment at past and future.
So the story - stories, actually - accumulate via merging or warring viewpoints. Wedde has written of his poetry, "I tend to cast around like a dog backtracking", and here such multiple movements build a barbed-wire grid of family connections and conflicts.
