Naked Ambition

A youngish up-and-coming minister gets his portrait painted, a bit bigger than life size. He takes delivery of the canvas, hangs it on his living room wall, stands back admiringly, and when his wife gets home, he presents it to her. Proudly. Contrary to his expectatons, she’s less than enthusiastic. Well. It is a nude. He reckons that he’ll enter it into the Archibald Prize. She reckons that her husband is a narcissistic moron.

Robert Gott’s French farce of a novel is full of doorbells ringing, dramatic entrances, extreme characters, savage putdowns and snappy comebacks. Gregory Buchanan, the minister in question, is surrounded by a scrum of women (wife, mother, premier, mother-in-law, sister, cop) all of whom are more-or-less desperately trying to save him from himself. He remains doggedly, hilariously wedded to his disastrous plans for the portrait. Gott gave us years of laughs with the supply-a-caption hijinx of the Adventures of Naked Man cartoons in The Age Entertainment Guide, and more recently turned his dab hand to historical crime fiction (the Murders series, also published by Scribe). In Naked Ambition he has constructed a situational comedy that reads like a play, as all the action takes place in the Buchanans’ home. By restricting his setting, he has more space to focus on characterisation. When a crime is committed, the story goes all Cluedo: as if they were in a police line-up, we scan the sharply etched cast that Gott has assembled, and we wonder, well, who the hell did dun it?

This is a novel about folly: political and personal. The witty, savage lines flash back and forth across the Buchanans’ lounge room, all watched over by Gregory’s ghastly portrait. Apparently Gott will enter a picture in the Archibald this year: I’m keen to see it, but am also ever-so-slightly terrified.