"Blow in your ear, and wake yourself up", exclaimed Daisy contemptuously, "I wouldn't send in the coupon if you were a free sample."

Freaking hilarious. Here's Luck was a complete sensation when it was published in Australia in 1930, and propelled Lennie Lower to a decade of ceaseless comedy writing in books and newspaper columns.

This is a darn funny series of sketches, really, hung around the loose plot of a father and son pair who are generally no good, gambling, drinking, and verbally abusing the women around them. Lower's descriptions are David Sedaris-level amusing.

I'm always worried, reading these kind of books, at how the women will be portrayed. Not that we can do much about the general sidelining of wives and mothers in this era (and the invisibility of all other women aside from the coquette) but sometimes it becomes too much. Thankfully, as the quote above shows, the women here are able to return fire just as strongly. Lower is aware of the lunacy and mental poverty of his men even as he deifies them. ( )

Lenny Lower is an Australian version of a cross between Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac, but I found myself expecting a "boom-tish" at the end of the many of the dead-pan jokes. Written in the first person, this Depression-era novel is certainly literature, and despite creating an expectancy of slap-stick that never comes, I feel that if Fitzgerald and Kerouac collaborated on an episode of Dad and Dave, Here's Luck would be the result! Not sure why Lower's work is not used more often in Australian schools, and I was glad to find this gem after reading Max Cullens' autobiography, Tell 'Em Nothing, Take 'Em Nowhere". ( )

I greatly enjoyed this nostalgic trip with Jack Gudgeon and his son, as they deal with wine, women, and Woggo Slatter in 1920s Sydney. Were it not for the setting (which had some of the flavour of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs), I could almost believe this book to be written by P.J. O'Rourke on one of his better days.
I shall visit the Gudgeons again. ( )