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Profile
Carl Shuker has said ‘The Method Actors is about the dangers of riches — material wealth, riches of experience and potential and possibility and stimulus, superabundance of information — whereas The Lazy Boys is about the dangers of poverty: material poverty, sure, but mostly poverty of options and potential, poverty of experience, of imagination, and of guidance’. His two novels made the ‘best books’ list in 2005 and 2006 in the Listener.
Selected published works
The Method Actors, 2005; The Lazy Boys, 2006.
Biography
Carl Shuker was born in Timaru in 1974. He started, and then abandoned, a degree in mathematics and law, and worked the late shift in a maternity hospital laundry before completing a degree in English literature. After graduating he moved to Tokyo and has lived there on and off for three years. In 2001, he completed a Master of Arts at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. The Method Actors was begun there. A polyphonic multilevel narrative, part historical investigation, part thriller and part love story, it was published in 2005 by American publisher Shoemaker & Hoard. In 2006, Shuker’s novel won the prestigious $65,000 Prize in Modern Letters through Victoria University of Wellington. Bill Manhire writes ‘It’s composed of dazzle and panic and wisdom. It seems to me to inhabit a world that has continuities with those 0f, say, William Gibson or Thomas Pynchon, but that operates with a new intensity and seriousness’.
The Lazy Boys was published in the US and New Zealand, also in 2006. The protagonist is Richey ‘Souse’ Sauer, a self-destructive, eighteen-year-old university dropout. As he attempts to escape his middle-class upbringing in Timaru, the novel follows Richey’s fall into a brutal nihilism. Charles Bisley commented in The Lumière Reader — ‘The Deep South has always been a good setting for the culture of unease; Shuker outdoes his predecessors in the literary virtuosity with which he calls up the familiar demons from the abyss, the abyss whose rim the crowd stumbles along rowdily. Listen to the thoughts, the idiolect of the peer group. Its conformism, its nicknames, its abusiveness, its banality, its brutality, its misogyny, its homophobia. In a word, ugly. And yet for some it’s one big party’.
Shuker, who has lived in London since 2006, has written the screenplay for The Lazy Boys, to be directed by Brendan Donovan (The Insiders Guide to Happiness and The Insiders Guide to Love) and produced by Michael Wrenn. The project is funded by the New Zealand Film Commission.
Carl Shuker’s website is www.carlshuker.com
Author photograph by Ed Swinden |
