King of Dirt by Holden Sheppard review – a grim portrait of homophobia and masculinity

The Guardian

2 days ago

Holden Sheppard made a name for himself in the world of young adult fiction with his debut Invisible Boys, which was recently adapted into a television series. In it, three young men from Geraldton, Western Australia, grapple with their sexuality in a hyper-masculinised environment.
Now, in his first novel written for adults, King of Dirt, one young(ish) man who has fled Geraldton after being outed by a mate, returns to rake over his choices and confront the forces that worked against him in his youth. It's almost as if this new novel is an extension of the first, or a more wary, complex reckoning with its themes.
Giacomo 'Jack' Brolo is a digger. Not a soldier, but a bloke who drives a mini-excavator for a living, in as remote an environment as he can manage. When we meet him, he's doing his best to resist the gay dating apps while keeping his head down on a job in the Nullarbor. But when an openly gay man, Spencer, joins the crew and he and Jack hook up, things go awry fast. It's not until a wedding invitation arrives, however, that Jack's precarious, isolated and peripatetic way of living is challenged in a serious way: will he spin further from the axis of friends and family, or return to face his demons?
From the outset, Sheppard establishes Jack's desperately sad, self-sabotaging behaviour, a consequence of his internalised homophobia; the novel's opening line is: 'All the other blokes in the yard hate Spencer cos he's a homo, but none of them knows I'm secretly a homo too, so I hate Spencer the most.' Jack is an alcoholic, wilfully reckless and suicidal. It's a grim portrait – likely all-too familiar to rural gay boys without solid support networks – of stunted desire and hopelessness.
When the novel moves back to Geraldton and the veil is lifted on Jack's backstory, we slowly come to understand what has led him to his current impasse. A fledgling sexual relationship with a boy in his friendship group named Xavier was destroyed by Jack's cousin Rocco, who also outed him to the family and, by extension, the whole town. Jack's return for Rocco's wedding is a way to smooth tensions but also an opportunity to reconnect with Xavier, who now goes by the name Brick – this might bring Tennessee Williams' drunken bisexual protagonist in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to mind but is actually a reference to Maitland Bricks.
Before his family can exhume their buried grievances, Jack hooks up with a woman from his mum's choir, Elena. 'Fresh off the boat' from Italy, she takes a shine to him without for a minute swallowing his bullshit, and remains a figure of support throughout. But his parents are taken with Elena, and start to imagine an alternate reality where she and Jack will get together and Jack can 'be normal' again. Sheppard sets in motion a moral choice between full but isolating disclosure and companionable but emotionally exhausting repression. Given the Brolos are Italian, this cultural and familial pressure is all the more acute.
Haunting the edges of this novel, and certainly representing an anxiety of influence for Sheppard himself, is the work of Christos Tsiolkas – most notably, his debut Loaded, about the self-destructive nihilism of young gay Greek man Ari. Jack isn't a nihilist, but he is crushed between the rigidity of his concept of masculinity and the insistence of his own desire.
King of Dirt is written, like Loaded, in first person, present tense; this gives it a psychological immediacy but also limits its scope. But where Tsiolkas located Ari in a specific cultural milieu, then extrapolated beyond the merely sociological, Sheppard doesn't quite succeed in making Jack representative of anything larger than himself. Cultural markers are strangely thin – the Italian family eats spaghetti under a picture of The Last Supper, while Brick's First Nations heritage is completely unsupported by detail – which undercuts not just the novel's naturalism but also its emotional stakes.
While it's refreshing to see a representation of queer men that leans away from cliched urban norms – there isn't a single reference to Kylie or glitter or drag – there is something oddly performative and retrograde about the parameters of Jack's relationship with Brick. They 'drink beer and bourbon. We have an impromptu burping contest. We eat barbecue Meatlovers pizza from Domino's. We bet on the footy together and compare our multis. We give each other bro-jobs at half-time.' It reads like a straight fantasy of gay life, where everyone's a bloke, every ride is pimped and the Pies keep winning.
There is a more interesting, more provocative book buried somewhere in King of Dirt – the kind of knowing exploration of sexuality and violence that Bret Easton Ellis interrogates in The Shards, or Adam Mars-Jones explores in Box Hill – but Sheppard seems too content with his contrarian vision of gay life to unearth it. Jack's journey towards self-acceptance might traverse some desolate landscape, but the destination is never really in doubt. At its best, its portrait of taciturn, damaged men trying to connect recalls the work of SE Hinton, flinty and deeply poignant. But Sheppard struggles to move out of the realm of young adult fiction, where the emotional stakes are more simplistic and the resolutions neatly predictable.
King of Dirt by Holden Sheppard is out now (Pantera Press, $34.99)