MUCK

A rural, coming-of-age memoir set in New Zealand, featuring a dairy farm and feckless parents.

Leaving urban Australia for a spread of 300 acres in the environs of Taonga (pop. 3,000), young Sherborne, with Dad (“The Duke”) and Mom (“Feet”), embarked on a life envisioned suitable for the distinguished landed gentry they planned to become. The Duke was self-important, Feet was a serious snob and their artistic scion, an only child who could accurately mimic Elvis and Nat King Cole, was as bewildered and self-centered as any adolescent. The author, putative heir to the property grandly named Tudor Park, tried to tame a pugnacious horse trainer and deal with an irascible cowhand and his surly son. It was, after all, a place for future generations, even though the neighbors were commonplace folk, far beneath the civilized owners of Tudor Park. The locals were slobs, and the cows are simpletons. So reports the author, in the mode of a Down Under version of Holden Caulfield—indeed, Sherborne was chosen to play the lead in his school’s musical version of Catcher in the Rye. As the growing teenager took it all in, rubbing the soil of the farm into his pores, The Duke taught his son about shaving and manliness, while Feet ranted constantly and gradually lost her sanity. In a distinctive, simultaneously caustic and funny style, the author writes poetically about family matters, adolescence, the farming life and “the pull of history.”

Poet and playwright Sherborne displays a sharp, sardonic voice.