Oh dear, I am the wrong person to be reading this, I thought to myself, as I began reading Gotham, Book 1 in Nick Earls’ new collection of novellas called The Wisdom Tree. I have paid so little attention to popular and consumer culture since the late 1960s that I am going to miss all the pop references in this novella. I am not going to know which names are real people/places/brands and which ones are not.

Well, as my subsequent discoveries show, (see below, if you too are culturally challenged) my (unrepentant) ignorance didn’t matter. I may have missed some earth-shattering allusion, but it didn’t compromise my reading of the story.

The setting is New York and the narrator is a journalist called Jeff Foster who is interviewing a waste-of-space rapper called Na$ti Boi. Na$ti is nineteen, he revels in his name (and events show that he deserves it), and Australia is about to be graced with his presence at some festival. Foster has sold and re-sold this interview – not just to the festival website. He seems to think that parents will want to read about this uncongenial young person in weekend magazines, and editors have agreed to publish his interview so presumably they think so too.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/01/gotham-by-nick-earls/ ( )