Yes, indeed it is about time we pulled finger and did a review. Luckily, I’ve just finished Nigel Cox’s latest, Responsibility (VUP).

Well. It’s a little like his last book, Tarzan Presley in that there’s the stunned mullet ‘where do I start’ feeling about starting the review. And of course, his inimitable style is the same. I’m not sure if that extremely original stream-of-consciousness thing is just blurted out, or incredibly crafted and honed (like mine). But who cares? It’s so deeply likeable, so goofy, so comfy.

Responsibility is told in the first person, and the narrator, Martin Rumsfield, is living in Berlin with his family – stroppy wife Bernadette, nubile adolescent daughter (from previous marriage) Sally, and two small boys, Fred and Sandy. He works in an advisory capacity for a large German museum.

Those familiar with the Nigel Cox story will immediately note some potentially autobiographical similarities - he was the leader of the project team that created the new Jewish Museum Berlin which opened in 2001. He was Head of Exhibitions and Education there until he and his wife and yes, three children, came back to NZ in April this year. Before Berlin, Nigel was the Senior Writer on the team that set up Te Papa, way back in the nineties. Before that: adman, deck hand, coalman, driver, sold turkeys door-to-door. Ah, the university of life.

Whether Nigel was tempted one day, as Martin was, by a devils advocate in the form of a sleazy shyster from a previous life, we’ll never know. We do find out that Martin is in fact more than tempted by the cheerily repugnant Stevens: enough to endanger his own life, and in the hair-raising end, those of his family, in a Nigerian scam that goes horribly wrong.

Sounds a bit cheesy? Yes, but luckily Nigel is well aware of this, and one step ahead. He constantly and hilariously takes the piss out of the whole ridiculous bad boy aspect of the would-be crime. The GNAE in particular had me almost crying with laughter: he’s deep in the bowels of the Nigerian embassy archives, trying to find a key in pitch darkness, when he hears a tiny scuffling. His twitchingly exposed ankles are convinced that it’s a Giant Nigerian Archive Earwig ‘with pincers of steel and a sting which would leave me, paralysed but living, suspended there between the boxes as a food source for its young.’

Entertaining as this kind of Cox digression is, it’s hard to ignore the fact that he has an eye for human behaviour that’s seemingly effortless. Family dynamics have an ease you can feel: here Martin, who is with his family on a weekend lake trip, plays cards with his son Fred: ‘in the lakeside dirt, on the twisted tree roots’. The youngest, Sandy, three, ‘comes and squats on his heels to watch. His hands are wet and I won’t let him hold the pack so he squeals. I have to tuck him, clammy little body, in between my thighs, where I squeeze him tight so that he is frustrated. But he endures this because he’s watching Fred to see what Fred will do. Now Sally comes. Languidly; I can’t look at her. She comes round behind me, puts her arms round my neck, rubs herself on my back. ‘Sally,’ I say, ‘go put on some clothes.’

There are some I know who had a problem with this father/adolescent daughter thing, and I have to say, it’s a theme which recurs here and there. But I think he’s honest about it, and open. And I know from observing my brother, who has three teenage daughters, that it’s pretty hard to know how to handle these glorious, hormonal creatures. You love them, you want to hug them, squeeze them, but you feel creeped out by yourself somehow, and you can’t. It’s complicated, a hapless, fatherly dilemma.

Martin’s general haplessness against the strong personalities in his life – especially the implacable Bernadette - had me harking back to certain mid-life crisis Saul Bellow types. He has a similar, part endearing, part infuriating capacity for self-flagellation as, say, Charlie Citrine in Humbolt’s Gift. And – god, yes! It suddenly strikes me: there’s a definite Jewishness about it! Oy vey: get the beautiful feisty shiksa to whip up some gefilte fish, play up the angst a little (but actually, not that much) – I’m thinkin’ Woody Allen here!

Read this book, and grab the rights, before I do. Nigel will be appearing soon at the Going West Festival in September... and Bill Manhire is finally coming north with him. But that's another article. Watch this space.