Memoirs of a Peon

When Michael Newhouse takes early retirement to avid certain disgrace he is 'stung by the snake of memory' into recording his early life up to the point where he becomes a peon to conventions that he thought his great talents would deliver him from. As a child, the death of his mother means that he is sent from the Waikato to Auckland to be raised and educated by grandparents. Additional lessons are provided by his extraordinary uncle Hilary, who lives upstairs. The outcome of this unusual upbringing is that Newhouse is forever cursed with a wide yet disorganised range of knowledge and he acquires the 'ornate' literary English of his elderly tutors - and a great deal of the comedy of the novel depends on the subtle way in which Newhouse's boasts and confessions are guyed by the bizarre inflations of his speech. Newhouse is returned to his father, but it is not long before he is back in Auckland to attend university and train to be a teacher - ambitions that turn out to be secondary to his predicament as a peon and his twin lusts for literature and women. The picaresque narrative of his pretentious bungling antics as he pursues his obsessions through the bedrooms of Auckland in the 1920s, is Frank Sargeson's own act of arch, wry, piquant and enduring comic homage to the ironies of enslavement.