At last, a new(ish) young writer who isn’t writerly, isn’t putting on some arch new tone, isn’t hiding behind some overblown or too clever construction – someone straightforward, without pretension – and a New Zealander.

Ok, so there is a little pretension. But it’s more of a conceit. Rod Bridgman (right) has self-published not only this latest work, Volcanic (Golden Tussock Publications) but several other autobiographical fictions. He has his own website and a press kit. He is one of a line of young male writers who live in a certain way: alone, impoverished and observing society ‘from the outside’.

As in Sartre’s Nausea, as in Fernando Pessoa’s recently and posthumously collected The Book of Disquiet (was there ever such a beautiful title?) Bridgman is everyman’s no man, anonymous, obscure. In Bridgman’s case, he lives in a shabby rented space in Devonport, Auckland. He has no money ($25 a week after rent); he heats his canned beef stew on a camper stove, washes himself out of a blue plastic bucket and – seeing as he is not actually meant to be living in his office space – sneaks in to use someone else’s toilet. His is the philosophy of refusal: refusal of success, of property, of conventional comforts.

Perhaps Rainer Maria Rilke, in the early 1900s, wrote the most excellent of this type of work, in his shockingly beautiful The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke was then 26, broke and new in Paris. ‘So,’ he writes in his opening,

… this is where people come to live. I would have thought it was a city to die in. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell … I saw a pregnant woman. She was dragging herself heavily along a high, warm wall …’

While Bridgman doesn’t have Paris, he does have New Zealand – which, in a truly great move, Volcanicmakes exotic. Devonport is ‘the village.’ Homes are built beside volcanoes, affecting our emotional life, Bridgman believes, by making New Zealanders ‘volcanic’:

‘always threatening to spill over or erupt … projecting an air of calm and dignity on the outside, but within, defending the self from fatalistic urges that lay simmering beneath the shallow surface of our crispy suntans … Especially in Devonport.’

The trees are fig, pohutakawa and cabbage (Bridgman’s favourite.) In the park, phoenix palms creak, wind comes off the harbour.

Instead of having cafes, Bridgman has a phone. Friends call and drop by and call him out. Many he has met on overseas trips to London, LA, Turkey, Brazil. Each is tauntingly familiar and strange, maybe because we all know a lot of people nowadays who are, on the page, familiar and strange. Nadir is a lovelorn male model from Turkey. Marty is ensconced in Mt Eden, finishing up a space shuttle. Armelle, freewheeling lover and painter, squeezes his nose across a coffee table and says ‘That’s for all the bullshit that comes out of your mouth.’

When alone, Bridgman spends his time writing, smoking, getting depressed and observing – in the absence of the cockroach – a rat’s claw digging a hole in his plaster wall.

It is not an easy life:

I was testing myself constantly, and throwing myself in the deep end, believing that – right or wrong, doing so would make me stronger and more vigilant, mentally.

But it is the life Bridgman wants to examine. Lucky for him, and the reader, Bridgman has a sense of humour, a lightness that makes this work funny as well as serious.

Bridgman calls Volcanic, coming in at 59 well-spaced pages, a novella. However, I really wanted more. Then, the day after I read Volcanic, I saw a collection of self-portraits: Phaidon’s Five Hundred Self Portraits. Flipping through it, I suddenly realised that this is what Volcanicis. In fact, I would like to rename it Self-Portrait beside the Volcano. May Bridgman offer us another, every few years would be great.

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Review No. 2: Kathy

Well, to conjure a hitherto unheard-of scenario, I’m going to have to add my two cents worth here. I’m not entirely sure I want to confer the kudos on Rod Bridgman which a double review entails but I just can’t resist … and I love the opportunity to have two healthily different points of view right here on the one page.

This guy is … is … well, words fail me. Almost. He’s so extraordinarily self-obsessed it’s not funny. He’s the first to admit it however: ‘I’m very self-absorbed as an artist. I’m only interested in exploring my own psyche, my own actions.’ That’s the thing. He annoys the hell out of you, then totally disarms you by admitting the very thing you’re sneering about. Which I have to admit, dammit, is sort of, almost, endearing. And – I tell a lie – it is funny.

He says he’s not a comedian:

I didn’t write these things to get a laugh. I speak and write completely from the soul … just listen to my spoken word CD [sorry, rather stick needles in my eyes, but again, will probably do it, with morbid fascination] – it’s the result of a person going through a year-long anxiety attack. I give more honesty than any other writer in NZ, and I get crucified for it.

This last bleat is hilarious: I’m 99 percent sure he’d love to be crucified, as publicly as possible. In fact, I’m going to subject you to an excerpt that shows he’s not only a masochist, he’s got a serious narcissism complex as well. Only a truly 'complex' person could write something like this and seriously expect anyone in the universe to actually want to read it:

I have a hole in my neck. A hollow pocket of skin with three pore-like tunnels leading into it. When I was seven years old a cyst began growing. It started off the size of a pea and ended up the size of a very large marble until my mother finally took me to the doctor and he cut it out …

… the skin didn’t entirely heal over the hole. It left three small gaps. Whenever I washed with soap or used shaving cream on my neck, the cyst pocket would fill up and over a period of time the contents would emanate a rancid, cheesy odour. I had to remember to squeeze the pocket of skin regularly. If it was completely full, the white cottage cheese gunk would of its own accord, squiggle out of the three opening like cream from a chef’s cream bomb …

Sometimes, if I was bored, I’d sit in my little room with all of my worldly possessions piled up high around me – facing the window and the late afternoon sun, with a glass of warm tap water. And while I was drinking my glass of warm tap water, I’d squeeze everything out of the hole in my neck, and I’d play with the smelly matter between my fingers – sniffing the odour, and thinking, maybe I was a little eccentric, but not entirely crazy …

Sorry about that, but see what I mean about words fail me? I mean, what is that? I think he’s completely and possible brilliantly taking the piss, but he may be too far up his own botty to realise he can probably get away with it. If I’m wrong, good on him. He exults in the fact that he’s self-publishing and breaking into the mainstream ‘without compromising his principles’ and jolly good on him. He easily acknowledges he ‘turned into a control freak at a very early age’. As one control freak to another, again I can applaud this. But it’s the furrowed-brow pictures (lots of them), the very juvenile look-at-me rantings that keep him right on the edge of my irritation scale, and way over the top of my bullshit meter. It is funny, though.

Well, I’ve just given him exactly what he wants. Controversy! Coverage! But go for it Rod. I think by subjecting yourself to so much ‘hardship’ in the name of literature, you’ve earned it. Even if you actually really get off on being, simply, a whiny little grub. I just hope you use some earnings from Volcanic to live a little. Regular showers! A few veggies! Sort out your neck-hole! Or maybe not – the unthinkable could happen: you could lose your smelly old ‘edge’. Quel horreur.