Martin Dean spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything, from the benefits of suicide to the virtues of strip clubs versus brothels. Now that he's dead, his son Jasper can fully reflect on the man who raised him in intellectual captivity, and the irony is: theirs was a grand adventure. As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father's demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries鈥攁bout his infamous and long-dead criminal uncle, his tortured and mysteriously absent European mother, and Martin's constant losing battle to make a lasting impression on the world. It's a story that takes them from the Australian bush to the cafes of bohemian Paris, from the Thai jungle to labyrinths, mental hospitals, and criminal lairs, from the highs of first love to the lows of rejection and failed ambition. The result is an uproarious indictment of the ridiculousness of the modern world and its mores, and the moving, memorable story of a father and son whose spiritual symmetry transcends all their many shortcomings. With rights sold around the world, A Fraction of the Whole is poised to be one of the most talked-about fiction discoveries of the year.
Steve Toltz (born in 1972) is an Australian novelist.
Toltz graduated from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1994. Prior to his literary career, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter.
A Fraction of the Whole, his first novel, was released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim. It is a comic novel which tells the history of a family of Australian outcasts. The narration of the novel alternates between Jasper Dean, a philosophical, idealistic boy, who grows up throughout the novel and his father, Martin Dean, a philosopher and shut-in described at the start of the novel as "the most hated man in all of Australia". This is in contrast with Terry Dean, Jasper's uncle, whom Jasper describes as "the most beloved man in all of Australia". The novel spans the entirety of Martin's life and several years after (a range never specified in the text, but starting after World War II and ending in the early 2000s), and is set in Australia, Paris, and Thailand.
The novel has repeatedly been compared favorably to John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. A Fraction of the Whole was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize and the 2008 Guardian First Book Award.
Holy... just holy, holy, holy. A Fraction of the Whole starts good, stays good for five hundred pages and three continents, is laugh-out-loud funny throughout, at certain points made my jaw drop in astonishment/horror, contains so many beautiful passages (you know the kind where you go yes! that's so true! like one about how it takes a couple hours to feel the sun on city streets in the morning, and one about the sounds of swimming pools), and gives us a couple of unforgettable characters, who even though they're implausible they're believable... this book is wonderful, and rewarding, and I already want to read it again. Which to me is one of the signals of great art -- that before I'm even done digesting my first plate of something, I want more, instead of just racing to the end to get to the whatever is next. I haven't started anything new since finishing it last night (which seems like a short time but there's a whole subway ride in there) because I want to hold this taste with me for a little while.
This book is so very worth reading. Don't be scared by the number of pages, it's so well-written and well-paced that it's not an issue. I have a hard copy now so if anyone wants to borrow the ARC (it comes out in April) let me know!
Well, I'm sorry, but I really didn't like this book. I feel a bit guilty for this, first because it came recommended by people whose tastes I totally trust (sorry Amanda! sorry Kira!), and second because, due to my really shamefully busy life, it took me a ludicrously long time to read this (sorry Steve Toltz). So yeah, I mean, it was my fault鈥攏ot Steve's鈥攖hat this book has been hanging menacingly over my head for freaking ages. But let's face it, Steve, it's your fault that your book just wasn't very good.
I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a lovely guy. But do you remember the first goddamn rule of every creative writing class ever? It's show, don't tell. Yeah. What that means, see, is that creating a character who's a "philosopher" doesn't give you the right to detail his meandering and only semi-deep thoughts for pages and pages and pages, nor does it make it okay for you to put twisty, overwritten speeches into his mouth, which also happen to last for pages and pages and pages. I'm really not trying to be a dick here, Steve. My guilt is compounded by the fact that you really do have lots of clever ideas, some of the writing was original and funny, and a handful of the episodes were enjoyable. But your two main characters were really just personality-less. Telling me that Martin is an enigma does not excuse you from making him so. Discussing over and over whether Jasper is a mirror-opposite or a polar-opposite of his father does not mean that you don't need make him interesting. The characters just endlessly whine and carry on and circumspect and angst-ify and fret. And while one could make the argument that that is fun to do, it is really really boring to read about. Unless you're talking about Hamlet, but come on, isn't he like the least interesting character in that whole play?
Three generations of a remarkably dysfunctional family. Superbly darkly comedic whilst covering isolation, crime, parenting, mortality and much more... including ow this family upsets an entire continent! A book that kind of loses its way towards the end, but the start, and most of the journey there is fantastic! 8 out of 12, Four Star read. 2009 read
What does it take to abandon a 711 page novel on page 458? After all there are only 鈥� er 鈥� 253 more pages to go.
Finish it!
狈辞鈥�!
The thing is, I bought a bookcase this week 鈥� ah, how beautiful it is. Not one of those damned filthy flat-packs, no. This one was carpentered by doughty craftsmen and delivered in one piece to my very door.
This is exactly what it looked like. How pretty. Now it is full of books. Yes!
So now I have all my unread books collected together in one room. My God 鈥� there are so many of them. Frankly I had no idea. I think I have been going mouseclick crazy. And most of these are from Amazon, which is not, as I thought it was, a benign organisation which provides work for marginal people in the Brazilian rainforest at all, it's a giant enterprise which has the morals of a praying mantis (The BBC tells me "Amazon.co.uk, the British division of the firm, is under scrutiny by UK tax authorities for its affairs over a six-year period, beginning in 2004鈥mazon.co.uk鈥檚 latest accounts reveal that it did not pay a single penny of British corporation tax in either 2010 or 2011").
And that's the problem 鈥� it's so easy to start riffing on bookcases and Amazon and corporate responsibility and other random subjects, every stand-up comedian does this, and Steve Toltz is a stand-up comedian masquerading as a novelist. As such, he's okay. Not bad. But he uses all his best one-liners in the first 200 pages. For example :
The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.
These days, when a war is on, "heroism" seems to mean "attendance".
Flowers really are lovely but not lovely enough to excuse the suffocating volume of paintings and poems inspired by them while there are still next to no paintings and poems of children throwing themselves off cliffs.
I love that "next to no".
You can see it's all a bit on the sour, mordant, deflating side 鈥� all right, this entire book is COMPLETELY on the sour, mordant, depressing side - because this is largely a comedy of sorts about mental illness, depression, anxiety and the like. The story is really fake, a silly cartoony not-meant-to-be-believable series of plot-like lunges all about a kid with problems growing up with his father who has even more problems and a presumed-dead uncle who had the most problems of the lot. None of the characters have the least appearance of life, they are manic stick-figures inhabited by the author's incessant, bellicose, blaring riffing on all the standard young male stand-up comic targets 鈥� school, drugs, lack of sex, fathers, police, school 鈥� when the comedy gives out, you get faux philosophising for a few pages. A Fraction of the Whole is just so blokeish, and as many readers point out, all the main characters, the son, the father, the uncle, speak in exactly the same maximum-volume voice. Which is the voice of Steve Toltz. I gave up when the character of Reynold Hobbs came along. This is a Rupert Murdoch stand-in 鈥� "the richest man in Australia". I couldn't take another 200 pages of sidesplitting savage satire of rich bastards. I checked my side. There was not the merest trace of a split. I checked the other. Nope. I looked at my new bookcase (which fills the room with the sweet aroma of varnish and wood). It sang its siren song.
Three stars for the 458 pages I read. You can't deny the manic energy of Steve Toltz' desire to write a lot.
I am shocked to see anyone complain about this book being too long. I spent the majority of my time laughing like a madwoman when I read A Fraction of the Whole. Just this part alone made me think of all my cynical Hungarian elders, because man do they think like this "The younger passengers let out cries of joy. The older passengers knew that the key to happiness lay in keeping your expectations low. They booed." There was not one sentence that I would be happy seeing taken away. WHAT A WORK OF FICTION! Politics, philosophy, religion, sex, love triangles this book is a mass of insanity. I absolutely fell in love with Jasper, the little runt. I picked up this book on accident really and didn't think it sounded promising. Ha, I was captured from the very first sentence. I not only recommend this book, but I try to force it on my friends. I can't wait until Toltz publishes more.