The Simple Gift Study Guide

Steven Herrick was born on New Year’s Eve of 1958, the youngest of his parents’ seven children. He dropped out of high school after his sophomore year and spent the next three years working a series of jobs and dreaming of a professional soccer career. When that failed to materialize, he completed his high school equivalent and went to the University of Queensland where he studied poetry. After college, he began performing poems at pubs and nightclubs in Sydney. His artistic output includes travel books, novels, poetry collections, and verse novels. He also spends time traveling to schools around Australia as a speaker where he talks to kids about books, life, and soccer. He lives with his family in the mountains outside of Sydney, Australia, where he focuses on writing and playing soccer on local all-age teams.

Set in the late 1990s, The Simple Gift explores a time on the cusp of the technological changes that characterize the contemporary world. Caitlin has a personal computer and a cell phone, but the novel portrays both as notable possessions and markers of her family’s wealth. In the fictionalized town of Bendarat, the book also explores how technological change affected local economies. When Billy arrives, he sees signs of economic stress, like every shop advertising sales as if they are desperate for money. Later, Old Bill explains that the town once served as a major shipping hub for goods traveling across the country by train. Two major changes upended the economy: the increased use of semitrailers to move goods faster and more nimbly than trains—a shift that coincided with heavy government investment in upgrading outback roads in the 1990s and beyond—and increasing automation. The economy of Bendarat in the book, then, faces the same challenges of many other industries in the early decades of the 21st century, including the growing use of machines and automated processes to accomplish jobs that used to be done manually.

With its two teenaged protagonists, both of whom are working to figure out how they fit into the world around them, The Simple Gift can be considered a coming-of-age novel. It has particularly notable resonances with J.D. Salinger’s 1951 classic of the genre, The Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden Caulfield, Billy Luckett has experienced deep trauma in his young life. Both run away in part to avoid this trauma. And while both teenage boys initially believe that they are entirely self-sufficient, both come to realize how much they need the love and support of others. Billy also reads two specific books in The Simple Gift, putting this novel in conversation with each. One of the books Billy reads is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Published in 1954 and deeply influenced by Golding’s pessimistic ideas about good and evil, this novel follows a group of boys stranded on a deserted island without adults and imagines the social breakdown that ensues without authority figures. In contrast, Billy escapes a life of brutality and violence in the home of his alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive father and finds peace, order, and meaning in life outside of the social organizations of biological family and school. Billy also reads John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the Joad family as they try to escape the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma for the promise of work in California. Billy tells Caitlin that the book portrays the honor of poverty, an honor he feels he shares thanks to living nearly penniless on the fringes of society. Additionally, The Grapes of Wrath thematically explores the fates of the people who get left behind in society either because of social and technological change (like the railroad workers who, in The Simple Gift, lost their jobs due to economic shifts in Bendarat) or personal trauma and circumstance.