"Age, no problem!" reads Stevan Eldred-Grigg from his new novel. "Gender, no problem. Constellation, no problem. Body, sex, race, all no fucking problem. Feeling, you know! Feeling! That is everything." Those words in Shanghai Boy are spoken by the 18-year-old Chinese youth Jay, for whom Manfred — a 50-year-old Pakeha New Zealander — has fallen. They are also more or less what the real Jay said to Eldred-Grigg, another 50-something Pakeha New Zealander. “Almost everything that happened to Manfred happened to me,” comments the writer, “and almost everything that Manfred did was done by me.” This is possibly too much information. What a novelist is supposed to do, on being asked if a story has an autobiographical basis, is to assert that it is entirely a work of the imagination. If pressed, that novelist might add coyly that on occasion writers of fiction might draw upon aspects of real life (usually other people's) that have been observed, collected and then adapted for fictional use. The stock answer always disappoints but sometimes it's also what we really want: we'd rather not be confronted with a middle-aged author who crosses the age divide in more ways than just the printed page. Fellow Kiwi Sue McCauley got away with it — her hugely successful novel Other Halves featured protagonists aged 32 and 16 and was autobiographical — but perhaps heterosexual women are exempt from disapproval. Queer men never are: subject to the ‘gay = paedophile' equation, gay May and December relationships are inevitably viewed as purely predatory. Stevan Eldred-Grigg doesn't come across as the coy author outlined above. Far from it. He's the one who, asked to supply a photo for an express profile some years back, sent up a professional-quality portrait of himself reclining in all his nude, full-frontal glory. Recently he launched his novel of “politically incorrect lust” in style by partying at Wellington's Monkey Bar. He's upfront, even upbeat, about the links between his life and Shanghai Boy: His father stretched out his death in Christchurch as Manfred's does. A sister and brother in the novel are also based on the author's own. The relationship Manfred has with Jay when teaching in Shanghai is one Eldred-Grigg had while teaching there between 2003 and 2004 . . . There have been moments of embarrassment. “When I was writing some of the sex scenes I was blushing,” he says. He was thinking that his sons might read them. (Perhaps there was no cause for worry. All three are grown up and when Eldred-Grigg told the eldest that his new partner was the young man's own age, his son responded that he couldn't talk: his own relationship was with someone 12 years older.) Shanghai Boy is “my first middle-age novel”, explains Eldred-Grigg, and he says that putting a man centre-stage signifies a departure. “I normally have a woman protagonist, because it's easier to set myself aside.” This novel didn't start out strongly gay: the writer initially thought its main character would be a young woman teacher. However, he thought it was time to go closer to home. So who is Manfred, really? “Like me he works very hard not to hurt people. At the same time he's not a sentimentalist . . . I was going to say he's a less together person than me. Manfred is— he hurts a lot. There's a big hole in the centre of his heart where there should be love, and some of that should have come from his father and it never did . . . he's not good at giving love. When Jay offers him love he keeps pushing it away. “Manfred is a mess,” Eldred-Grigg declares. He laughs when asked if he isn't a mess himself, replying that the character is messed up “in a different way from me”. Manfred Morse is also a parallel to a female character created by Janet Frame in A State of Siege. Like Malfred Signal before him, Morse is a middle-aged teacher who escapes one life only to be trapped in another. Both characters are haunted by a knocking sound. Eldred-Grigg describes Frame's story, first published in 1966 and reissued this month, as “one of the most important novels I've ever read. Janet Frame is, to me, one of the goddesses of literature.” When he started reading books for adults as a teenager, he found much New Zealand fare “repulsive” and lacking in any real appreciation of language. (“New Zealand fiction by and large is tone deaf. I think that very few writers in this part of the world actually hear the words as they write them.”) But A State of Siege came as a revelation: “From the first page it was a rainbow. I was enlivened by every sentence of that novel.” And as a lonely teenaged boy he could identify strongly with Malfred, “so she's been in there, waiting to come out.” The Manfred–Malfred connection enables Eldred-Grigg to enrich and deepen what has emerged as a major theme in Shanghai Boy: society's obsession with youth, and how this has intensified. The age gap between Jay and Manfred takes on a different hue when seen as part of that exploration. The issue, and the author's treatment of it, are further enriched by cultural differences between West and East. While the West views older–younger relationships as subject to a time-honoured taboo, Eldred-Grigg says the East considers them to be an honoured tradition. “A lot of Western men I think get very thrown by this when they go to Asia.” In China, private relationships between young male servants and their older masters were traditionally accepted up to a point, providing the men maintained public and child-rearing partnerships with women. And following the end of the morally conservative Mao era, gay life is emerging from the shadows. Shanghai has a flourishing gay scene and some young Shanghainese (Jay included) choose to live fully gay lives. Shanghai has fascinated Eldred-Grigg since he first read about it in his teens. In the 1920s and '30s, he enthuses, it was dubbed ‘the whore of the East'. Like a frontier town, it was a conduit and, he says, “an open city in many ways”. In recent years it's been at the forefront of China's technology boom. Its filth, barren in certain respects, is fertile ground for any writer — so perhaps it's unsurprising that he selected Shanghai as a setting for his fiction and (briefly) his life. More unusually, though, in Shanghai Boy the city becomes just as much a character as the humans he writes about. “I wanted the city to feel very alive,” he says. “I wanted to look at the ordinary people of Shanghai as much as possible. Most descriptions in the Western media focus on the glam, glitzy parts.” All this ties in with his long-time fascination for what he calls ‘transgression' and ‘crossing over'. “The moment I get settled in a city I want to go somewhere else where I'll be alien . . . The moment I'm comfortable I then want to get uncomfortable or discomfited.” In this way he discovered long ago that the ‘wrongness' of male-to-male sex was one of the things that excited and frightened him about it. (With homosexuality now more acceptable, he still clearly finds it attractive.) According to Eldred-Grigg, who left his marriage twelve years ago, “One of the good things about being queer is that you can doubt all the rules handed down. You just go through life improvising and finding out what works.” So does he have any taboos? He laughs, then gets serious: “The lines I draw are lines to do with violence; exploitation; cruelty; power — not abusing power.” If he refrains from handing out abuse, he is nevertheless generous in dispensing social, moral and ethical discomfort. The fact that the words ‘controversial' and ‘provocative' crop up repeatedly next to his name suggests he quite likes doing this, although he contends “I'm constantly startled by what people find shocking.” After he'd written the novel Mum (1995), he told a literary gathering of mostly middle-aged, middle-class Dunedinites that his mother was a manipulative, angry bitch who had messed up the lives of many people. He felt a chill descend on the room, and “all of a sudden [playwright] Roger Hall stood up and was very angry with me.” Eldred-Grigg thinks that because his family was “fucked up”, they lacked a strong sense of boundaries and didn't mind what they said to each other, “which is really quite good for a writer”. Perhaps his social sciences background (he is also a historian, as evidenced by several non-fiction works) has also encouraged frankness. “You are taught to describe, not prescribe — and of course that's invaluable for a fiction-writer too.” He's told Herald canvas he feels the job of a writer is to write everything that nobody wants to say. To this interviewer he adds: “I wouldn't be able to stop myself from writing things that people don't want me to say, even if I tried.” Claire Gummer is a former express newspaper editor and Women's Bookshop staffer who now works as an editor for Random House, the publisher of Shanghai Boy. She talks about books fortnightly on the G