Here's Luck

Here's Luck
by Lennie Lower

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About Book

From Publishers Weekly
First published in 1930, this reissue of what has been hailed as "Australia's funniest book" will leave modern American readers asking, "Says who?" Lower's pursuit of irony and folly is tireless. But with a trifling plot line used primarily as a vehicle for the jokes the comedy soon grows tiresome. So do the cantankerous characters who inhabit nondescript settings and whose emotional states are frequently reduced to adverbial phrases. Residing in a seedy Sydney suburb, Jack Gudgeon is a middle-aged, unemployed male chauvinist and part-time drunk whose wife leaves him and their 19-year-old son, Stanley. Under his father's supervision, Stanley is introduced to drinking straight whiskey from a mug, nights in the slammer and his father's views on the perils of loving women ("I have noticed this in women, that they positively glory in displaying a long-suffering meekness in the face of imagined wrongs. They do it in the hopes of embarrassing the male"). Joined by a motley crew of derelicts, father and son set out on a hedonistic rampage, visiting strip clubs, dive bars, race tracks and all-night diners, and hosting boozy fiestas. Lower, a popular Australian newspaper columnist, was a mere 27 when this book, his only published novel, went to press quite remarkable considering his narrator is middle-aged and holds the cynical opinions of a bitter old man. Clever musings are overshadowed by an oft-formulaic irony (at least by modern standards) that would play better in a stand-up routine or collection of vignettes than over the course of a novel.

Book Description
"Gonna back all the winners?" asked Mr Slatter pleasantly. Or as pleasantly as he could. He was not the type of man I usually associate with. He was tall and very broad about the shoulders, attired in a silvery-grey suit and a hard hat. His features reminded me of the cliffs at South Head, and his nose, which had evidently been broken at some time, had a disposition to lounge about his face. I pictured him shaving with a hammer and a cold chisel.

Download Description
Gonna back all the winners? asked Mr Slatter pleasantly. Or as pleasantly as he could. He was not the type of man I usually associate with. He was tall and very broad about the shoulders, attired in a silvery-grey suit and a hard hat. His features reminded me of the cliffs at South Head, and his nose, which had evidently been broken at some time, had a disposition to lounge about his face. I pictured him shaving with a hammer and a cold chisel.

From the Publisher
Residing in a run-down Sydney suburb during the Depression, Jack Gudgeon, age 48, is a male-chauvinist, money-owing cynic, layabout, and barroom philosopher. His wife, Agatha, having had more than she can take, has finally walked out on him. With Jack and his equally unreliable adolescent son, Stanley, left to fend for themselves, pandemonium ensues. Full of sardonic wit and mad capers, father and son blaze a trail of drunken chaos through the city¹s pubs, clubs, race courses, and their own increasingly battered home. Along the way, they fall in with a weird and wondrous assortment of lowlife characters who turn up to enliven the kind of party that Mr. Gudgeon invariably intends to be a ³quiet, respectable turnout,² but which, somehow, never is.

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