A Fraction of The Whole
Steve Toltz, Spiegel & Grau
This is my review that originally ran last April on Ain’t It Cool News, and even shows up on the quotes page of the paperback edition which has just hit stores. So thank you to the nice folks at Spiegel & Grau.
I used to think that ‘The Corrections‘ was the greatest thing I’d ever read, but I’ll have to say that ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ is better than ‘The Corrections’. Toltz did it in one book. Franzen took two to get ‘The Corrections’ out into the world. Granted, you have your whole life to write your first novel, but my God, ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ does things in 530 pages that most writers can’t do in a lifetime.
I’m floored by what I found to be a wildly addictive exploration into a man’s soul, a profoundly moving experience almost religious in its execution and possibly one of the sharpest and irresistibly humorous post modern adventures I’ve had the pleasure to read. Where did this guy come from? Who has the stones to publish this first novel as one of their lead titles on a maiden list in a market that repels fiction written by men, literate fiction that is. Spiegel and Grau, get used to hearing that name.
Terry and Martin Dean are a pair of notorious brothers from Australia, one is hated the other loved, and Martin’s son Jasper tells their story from a prison cell. That’s where we start and it gets so sweet (I mean ‘sweet’ like, “man that’s so sweet”, not, that’s sweet, oh, look at that puppy) from this point on I can hardly contain myself. Father and son stories are usually written by the son, and hardly ever told by the father, I don’t know why, but it’s basically true. The voices here are hard to tell apart and would have been phony if they were different as children often sound and say things just like their parents. But Jasper allows his father to tell him the story of his youth growing up in a small town with his troublemaking brother Terry. You see, Terry is the local bad seed and his town wants him shipped off to bad boys’ camp, Martin his sickly brother, and I won’t spoil how he gets sick, or how his parents try to keep him in his sick bed, but let’s say Dr. Phil wouldn’t be happy. Terry bands together with a couple of hooligans to make trouble, but then they decide they need a mentor. Their father coincidentally built the local prison and they figure it must have at least one teacher mixed in with all those criminals. A wild caricature named Harry gives them advice and this is where the novel goes into overdrive not really slowing down until page 300 or so.
Terry and Harry momentarily disappear from the story only to resurface after some truly biblical events make their presence almost too perfect to be believed, (killing corrupt sports athletes is just one example). All the while Martin decides to help Harry write a book about becoming a top notch criminal and what a book it is. I won’t even tell you about the suggestion box that Martin concocts which sends his brother on the wrong path, to do that would be bad form on may part. But Martin is trying to mark his territory just like his brother who can’t spell his name if he pissed it in the snow.
Toltz does something dazzling at this point, while Martin is trying to discover why he’s such a mashed potato sandwich and his brother the spice of life he tells his son Jasper about his long lost mother, again, the book soars. These pages told through diary entries that the son discovers are so vivid and filled with soul crushing philosophies that a page didn’t go by where I wasn’t gob smacked by the profundity that bleed from the page. Each chapter of this book is another layer of Martin’s life, and we find out more about Jasper, while a strange man named Eddie appears and I thought this was an odd plot twist, but he turns out to be the tails up bad penny you never bend over to pick up, and Toltz winds him tight as a wet rope for the rest of the story. It’s with Jasper’s birth that the book turns on a dime and we start to really understand the depth of Martin’s despair, his loneliness and his insanity that is spreading faster than crab grass on my front lawn in July.
Martin has always lived in his brother’s shadow and when he finally gets out from under it he can only frown at the world while his son lives in a place that echo’s both his uncles success and his fathers continued failure. When Martin braces his son with the fear of death after he gets kicked out of school, not actual death, but the idea of death, Jasper doesn’t get it and this is where father and son split up, mentally that is. Martin says, “I wash my hand of you.” Jasper replies, “be sure to use soap.” Which is a sample of the how funny Toltz can be.
I can’t tell you anymore, the revelations of Martin, Terry, and Jasper are too rich and it would be a spoiler to do so. I can safely say that Steve Toltz has written a masterpiece, a smashing debut that will long be remembered as a colossal example of just how good fiction can be. He keeps you wired to the page from the jump and he defies gravity all the way to the end.
-Jason Rice
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