A Fraction of the Whole: Steve Totlz

In the wake of Steve Toltz’s much publicised $100,000 advance – still middling by comparison to what first timers like say, Jonathan Safran Foer received – the expectation for this debut novel is wiltingly high, and the sound of knives being sharpened is akin to the buzz of the killing floor. There’s an unspoken hope that Toltz’s first novel will prove somehow less than worthy, or that in its nearly 700 pages, there’s some justification to all of us that the money wasn’t worth it.

Unfortunately for those of us who thought that way – and yes, I admit I was one – it seems to be worth every red cent. The book centres on the lives of two brothers (or more accurately half-brothers) and their near and dear: Terry and Martin Dean, Martin’s son Jasper, and Catherine, a woman both brothers love. The book begins with Martin telling the story; Martin who lives in the shadow of his brother, a dead criminal whose death in a prison fire has bolstered the legend of his life to an almost Ned Kelly degree. Then Jasper takes over the reins of the narration, and like his father, his voice is prone to blowouts of near bipolar intensity.

Martin’s version of events seeks to bring the mythologising down a tone or two, and balance out the true story; but fate intervenes. Martin is a thinker and an inventor, whose philosophising and tinkering play a great role in the general mayhem of his life, while Jasper – still in his teens – has a less cohesive grasp of his father, misunderstanding his hubris.

By the time Terry disappears into history, Martin is more concerned with his son Jasper, whose neuroses supplant and even surpass his father’s. There’s a streak of envy and disregard that each carries for the other, and if it were not for Toltz’s deft handling of the sarcasm each engenders, it would be a heavy-going and turgid book.

But A Fraction of the Whole is anything but heavy-going – it is light on its feet; fast and wonderfully witty, with a head full of sharp one-liners. Toltz has read his heavy philosophy, but also his humorists: occasionally a pessimistic, small-town snarl that recalls Garrison Keillor or even Mark Twain (like them, Toltz all too clearly understands the national psyche) takes aim at our national laziness, the neuroses about success we prefer to disguise as modesty.

Add to this a gift for plot (there’s a twist that doesn’t telegraph itself in advance), as well as a bizarre turn of events where Martin Dean becomes a politician of note on the back of a ridiculous scheme to make all Australians millionaires, and you have a story about the Australian lack of self-esteem that dares not flatter us at all. Upon finishing it, I threw the book across the room in terrible jealous rage and fury, knowing that there is now a contender in Australian literature.

I await his second novel with great anticipation, and certain in the knowledge that Toltz will likely confound expectation again.

Read Time Out's interview with Steven Toltz.

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