If you’re a person that baulks at reading about sex, drugs, and debauchery, and is allergic to the dreaded f-word and its much more controversial swear-mate, the c-word – this is absolutely not the book for you. But if you’re up for reading about these matters, are not shy of this kind of Australian vernacular, and are seeking a reading experience that is unlike any other you’ll encounter this year, Pissants is absolutely the book for you. It’s a raw, honest, and audacious take on the AFL machine that churns through so many young people in our community, and is eye-opening, eye-watering, and surprisingly emotional.
Brandon Jack (yes, the Brandon Jack who is a former Sydney Swans player and also wrote the critically acclaimed 2021 memoir, 28) has written this debut work of fiction, which leaves no detail of the club experience unexplored, using a range of creative writing styles (an interview transcript, a bingo card, a WhatsApp chat, internal monologues, along with more straightforward discursive modes), to get deep inside the psyches of Fangs, Stick, Shaggers, Elliott, and many others who form the secondary players and staff of the redacted Football Club. These multiple literary techniques are incredibly effective in building the picture of what might happen off the field, in the locker room and beyond, illuminating the pressures on these young men, who are all so desperate to belong and be valued, and must seek and perform that belonging and value in a hyper-masculine corporate environment, relying on corporeal talents that are only one injury or bad decision away from obsolescence. It’s intense.
As I was wincing and laughing my way through this narrative whose protagonists operate in a parallel universe to mine, I wondered whether my bookish self would ever be imagined as the ideal reader for this novel. I reasoned that on a superficial level I’m an unlikely candidate, if only for the fact that I’ve been to precisely one AFL game in my life. But the great big heart of this book is a critical take on so many of the things I want to read about: identity, passion, culture, language, and the always unfinished work of making the self, written with tremendous flair, sensitivity, and originality by a writer who is a reader and a thinker. Turns out, I f***ing loved Pissants, and Brandon Jack just drop-punted it straight into my heart.
