Writing is about, if anything, ideas. And Steve Toltz has a lot of them. His book, "A Fraction of the Whole," is a sprawling stew of philosophies and ruminations, a grand fictive enterprise teeming with two-sided arguments over everything from the meaning of life to the horror of death. There's no doubting that Toltz's ambitions are lofty, but his prose is loopy and lanky. The end result may be a bit bloated, but it's also dangerously close to being brilliant.
Martin Dean, a moderately deranged father, and Jasper, his emotionally stunted son, form the core of the novel. Although their individual and combined stories concern things like espionage, mental hospitals, murder sprees, comas, first loves, and the burning down of an entire town, most of the story actually takes place in the plotless morass of these guys' heads. Both Martin and Jasper shudder when they are labeled philosophers, but they seem unable to do much more than let life wash over them while they try vainly to sift purpose and justification out of the foamy waves.
Toltz may be brimming with interesting bon mots and thought-provoking insights, his story may be almost obsessively concerned with the cold, shuddering stop that comes at the end of life's twisted coil (four separate characters commit suicide), but his writing is agile and clever enough to shrug off the ponderous gloom that normally comes with such a dark and dismal subject matter. Martin and Jasper never miss an opportunity to analyze the weird and warped ways of life and its inevitabilities, but at least they do it without taking themselves too seriously. They are like clowns smirking under painted frowns. And what is a clown, anyway, except a philosopher with flashier clothing?
With a book this boldly open-ended, there are a slew of unanswered questions left by the final page. And Toltz's unrelenting digressions and thought-games -- no matter how wittily phrased -- are sure to turn some people off. This reviewer ate them up (some pages I read over and over, they're that savory). In fact, I suspect that Toltz is on the verge of mastering the kind of multi-layered literature that is missing in most fiction these days. This book has as much import and potency as any of the novels you'll find on a typical list of "classics," but the writing is so unpresumptuous, so effortless and delectable, that the themes aren't alienated by the words. It's a dense thicket, this book, but it isn't inaccessible. Toltz gives you a machete and shows you where to start swinging.
It's too bad many (dare I say most?) readers today prefer their reading to be less about work and more about distraction. Don't get me wrong; Toltz's imagination is a vibrant and entertaining place, but Martin and Jasper are inexhaustible theorists, pessimists with a cause, idealists who love humanity but hate society, relentless dancers who can't stand music. Out of them pours every wild idea it seems that Steve Toltz has, and although many of them are left wild, most of them come together in the book's twisted knot of a heart. It's a frustrating and ingenious mess, as beautiful and contained as a thunderstorm.
It's easy to imagine, reading this tome, that Toltz simply took every idea he ever had for a book and put them all between the same two covers. I certainly hope that's not the case. Toltz's style is irreverent and modest, learned and loony, smart, captivating, provocative and fun. Here's hoping he has a lot more in him waiting to come out.
