“Virgil and Homer would recognise these hulking airborne men,” Helen Garner wrote of AFL players in her most recent book The Season. As the celebrated author and footy tragic watched her grandson play in an U16 league, she found in the sport “a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry.”
Garner has enthusiastically blurbed the scabrous debut novel of former AFL player Brandon Jack: Pissants, a book mostly dedicated to the arcane rites that play out off the oval – preferably as far from the citizenry as possible. Whereas Garner lovingly traces the epic dimensions of teenage footy in the suburbs, Jack depicts AFL culture as a crucible for addiction, misogyny and brutal conformity. As readers of Jack’s 2021 memoir 28 will know, this novel draws from the well of personal experience: much like his characters, Jack spent his early adulthood adjacent to AFL stardom, playing 28 senior games for the Sydney Swans before being unceremoniously retired.
William Burroughs, Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski are the poets who would recognise Jack’s Pissants, a group of players relegated to the fringe of an unnamed footy team, hoping to get a game. They cushion themselves against humiliation and ego death in the traditional manner: getting wasted, obsessing about their dicks (and everybody else’s) and treating women like disposable props. Collateral damage includes a dead woman and a dead dog. There’s very little in the way of plot to speak of and abundant variations on themes of degradation and anti-authoritarianism.
We know the Pissants only by their nicknames and the brittle stories they tell about themselves. There’s no one noble protagonist on a journey of personal growth or redemption; perhaps the stars who kick game-winning goals each week are entitled to an individual character arc – but not these guys, whose identities have been deformed under the pressure of club culture. If Pissants has an agenda, it might be to demonstrate the conditions that produce such obnoxious young men, withhold their agency and shield them from the consequences of their behaviour.
Most of the novel takes the form of interior monologues delivered by the various Pissants, interspersed with found texts – Pissant arcana, if you like. The players are piss-eloquent narrators: reckless, funny, profane. In its best stretches, Pissants is a work of rowdy polyphony; reading it is a bit like being on the town with a bunch of big talkers just before things fall apart.
There’s Fangs, the grandiose ironist; Stick, an arsehole; and Shaggers, who is just trying to keep it together. Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting is a clear influence on the hectic vernacular mode of Pissants (and respectfully invoked through frequent references to suppositories and shitstains).
But the problem with relying on the interior monologues of desperate, wrecked narrators to carry a novel is that – as is the case with so many front bar nihilists – things get messy and repetitious. That it’s not all slapstick vignettes might be the point here, but even so, the pace of Pissants is slowed by tedious disquisitions on such topics as the protocols of Mario Kart.
Jack recently told Guardian Australia that “there’s no agenda to this book for me”. To me, that seems like a bit of a cop-out, because it’s hard not to read Pissants and its cast of damaged, charismatic narrators as a compassionate, even forgiving account of toxic masculinity. Jack was acclaimed for his unflinching self-portraiture in 28. Here, he seems determined to withhold judgment on the Pissants and their behaviour and the result is a book that cannot decide whether it is a critique or a celebration of the culture it observes.
Yes, the Pissants are aggressive, entitled gronks who drink each other’s urine on the regular, but our attention is always drawn back to their charm, their vulnerability and their love of a good laugh. Of course the Pissants themselves are largely indifferent to women, being mainly interested in each other – but the novel isn’t much interested in them either. The only woman with a moderately developed character is Belle Thompson, “the incestual sister who everyone messaged on a night out and wanted to fuck after a few drinks”. She gets to crack rape jokes, but for some reason she doesn’t get to speak for herself. Only the fellas get access to the first person.
In the periphery hover the silhouettes of other women: nags, sluts, a power-suit-wearing AFL executive called Kiwi Kel, an ex-girlfriend or two. One Pissant does incur narrative consequences for sexual misconduct right at the end of the novel, but that reckoning is a travesty of justice, played for shock value. These authorial decisions about how to represent gender and gender relations can’t be brushed aside as having “no agenda”.
We know that footy culture brutalises young men and that it fails to protect young women, both in this novel and in Australia in 2025. To be honest, reading Pissants has left me a little weary of the poetry of footy. It might be patriarchy that silences women and exonerates male violence, but it’s the bloody poets who continue to exalt these athletes, who let grace, discipline and ambition serve as excuses for each and every transgression.
Pissants by Brandon Jack is out now (Simon & Schuster, $34.99)
