Loïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

Enter Dominic Gordon, who, in Excitable Boy, writes Melbourne’s margins with punch and panache. He takes the reader to places we know exist but probably have not experienced: for example, the sedulous unpaid shiftwork of the night-time graffiti vandal, combining inks and dyes to add ‘toxicity to the stain’; and the world of the dedicated clothes stealer.

Think of Jean Genet, who described a criminal world smelling of ‘sweat, sperm, and blood’. Gordon shares the Parisian’s sexual adventurism, disengagement with quotidian morality, and conviction that the abject can be transmuted into art. Like Genet, he is unapologetic about his illegal activities. Gordon’s demesne is the world of ‘oddballs, addicts, loners, fugitives of self’. He documents the crackle of the ‘street orchestra in full swing,’ in an environment where ‘hard city shapes chop and change, jabbing in and out of each other like unfinished conversations’. The bloated, partially bogus Chopper Read books were a commercial phenomenon that titillated the law-abiding majority. By contrast, Gordon portrays the petty pleasures and dank longueurs of scuzzball-level criminality with alarming vividity – and, presumably, accuracy – without ever making it glitter.