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By Greg Mortimer
| Wednesday, March 05, 2014
When Steve Toltz finished studying
video production at university in Australia, he was appalled to realize
he’d completed his degree without reading a book. “I thought I'd squandered
my education, I got into a panic about it,” he told The Guardian in
2008. “So I went to the University of New South Wales, went to the Russian
literature department, said 'give me a reading list', and started working
my way through it."
The experience must have been
something like a detonation. I don’t know if Toltz intended all that
reading might to inspire a book of his own, but his 600-page debut, A Fraction of the Whole,
became a finalist for the Booker Prize and remains hands-down one of my
favorite novels--one I would buy for almost every serious reader I know if
I could.
It’s the acidly funny story of three men’s misadventures (and I
normally hate the word misadventures,
but it applies in spades here) from Australia to Paris to Thailand: the
demise of hapless, homegrown philosopher Martin; his brother Terry, the
infamous criminal mastermind; and his teenage son Jasper, who narrates most
of the novel with the cynicism and wonder of someone who’s thrust into
adulthood a little too quickly. (Astrid, his mother, remains mysteriously
absent.)
Toltz’s plot moves like the end of a
live wire, propelled by wild circumstance and incident. Esquire’s review
corroborates twists like a massive fire caused by a beam of sunlight
through an observatory telescope, or an exploding barge on the Seine: “It
reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus. . . .
kite-strung with mind fucks.” But there isn’t a page without the fireworks
of Toltz’s prose, and the disastrous results of his characters’ good
intentions are as hilarious as they are heartbreaking.
And that’s where you
start giving A
Fraction of the Whole real kudos, because it’s fiction that
grapples with the complexity of modern life in a way that actually feels
original. Its metaphysical questions about consciousness, mortality, and
belief give it a heft that easily equals A
Confederacy of Dunces or The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. At the end, when Jasper’s
awakened consciousness finally gives him closure about how to reconcile his
place in the world, the novel becomes moving in a way that’s as deeply
satisfying as the wild ride that delivers him.
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