A Fraction of the Whole [Import] [Paperback]

Steve Toltz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0385665555 | ISBN-13: 978-0385665551

With rights sold around the world, this irreverent comic adventure spanning three continents is poised to be one of the most talked about fiction débuts of the year.

A Fraction of the Whole marks the arrival of an ambitious new writer who deftly mixes humour, surprise, and astute observations of the human condition to create a novel that entertains, scandalizes, and enlightens.

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.

As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father’s demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries – about 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 cafés 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.

I spent the next day staring into empty space. I get a lot of joy out of air, and if sunlight hits the floating specs of dust so you see the whirling dance of atoms, so much the better. During the day, Dad breezed in and out of my room and clicked his tongue, which in our family meant: ‘You’re an idiot.’ In the afternoon, he came back in with a loaded grin. He had a brilliant idea, and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to throw me out of the house, and what did I think of his brainwave? I told him I was concerned about him eating all his meals alone because the clinking of cutlery on a plate echoing through an empty house is one of the top five depressing noises of all time.
--from A Fraction of the Whole


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father's body will never be found. As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative—thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments—sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“A fantastic, rollicking adventure of a novel, both startlingly original and hysterically funny. Surely this is the new picaresque, rivaling Ignatius Reilly and Billy Bathgate.”
– David Francis, author of The Great Inland Sea

“ [A] sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer. . . . Toltz’s exuberant, looping narrative [is] thick with his characters’ outsized longings and with their crazy arguments. . . . Comic drive and Toltz’s far-out imagination carry the epic story. . . . Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This misanthropic, laugh-out-loud funny novel tells the story of a brilliant, eccentric and star-crossed outsider and his son in contemporary Australia. With its chance encounters, mysterious criminals, malevolent townspeople, attacks of mental illness and mad schemes for civic and national improvement, A Fraction of the Whole is not so much a shaggy dog story as a woolly mammoth story. Martin Dean and his son Jasper take turns narrating a story steeped in Australian cultural icons: sporting mania, brush fires, the Ned Kelly myth, rapacious right-wing media barons, Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's also a story of Big Universal Questions as the two characters ruminate on religion, philosophy and death. Toltz's analytical, nihilistic loners are like Dostoyevsky characters who have wandered into an episode of Seinfeld, which, come to think of it was a Dostoyevskian sitcom.
- Winnipeg Free Press

"A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humour, and characters reminiscent of John Irving...A Fraction of the Whole soars like a rocket." –Los Angeles Times

"A riotously funny first novel...harder to ignore than a crate of puppies, twice as playful, and just about as messy." –The Wall Street Journal

"A startling debut....A non-stop, politically incorrect diatribe about — for and against — religion, politics, relationships, sex, marriage, work, play, children, sleep, friends, art, labyrinths, schemes, and dreams....Devastatingly funny." –The Seattle Times

"Rollicking....laugh-out-loud funny." –Entertainment Weekly

"That rarest of long books — utterly worth it....Witty and intellectual, a physical comedy and literary rant all at once....Comically dark and inviting." –Esquire


From the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Anchor Canada (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385665555
• ISBN-13: 978-0385665551
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (126 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,420,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uncommon Denominators, December 23, 2007

By 

Mark Eremite "This Is A Display Model Only" (Seoul, South Korea) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Fraction of the Whole (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

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.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Virtuosic yet self-indulget, March 23, 2009

By 

wbjonesjr1 (São Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Fraction of the Whole (Paperback)

This was a really tough book to get through. I only did because I thought the writing was outstanding. Tolz is a literary virtuoso. There are great positives in this book, from the overall originality of the novel; to the very moving and powerful climax; to an extraordinarily original and intricate plot; through Tolz's writing. But there are also aspects that irritate and almost made me give up halfway. These are:

- the characters are impossible to like. This applies to Martin and Jasper Dean, both of whom are just too wierd and eccentric and self-important to care about. The review on the cover page comparing this novel to " A Confederacy of Dunces" does "Confederacy..." a disservice: Ignatius O Reilly is also wierd and eccentric and self important but he was comic and pathetic in a way that the Deans never manage to be. By the way, its not easy to like much any of the secondary characters either...

- some plot twists are hard to handle, eg. Anouk's transformation from hippy into "one of the richest women in Australia";

- while the book had a hugely entertaining first 100 or so pages and equally excellent final 100 pages, the middle was boring at times, irratating at others (where it seems Tolz wants to show he's read every book on philosophy ever written). The one exception here is the part involving bullying and suicides at Jasper's school, which is really really emotionally devastating - enough so to make one persist through the book in search of more of the same power (which does finally happen).

3 stars therefore for exceptional power and excellent writing, versus some (rather lengthy) deeply irritating sections and unsympathetic characters. But I'm very curious to see what Tolz will come up with next

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All these fractions do make an interesting whole, February 7, 2008

By 

M. A. Filippelli "Marc12074" (Roseville, CA, US) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Fraction of the Whole (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

An interesting story about Father - son(s) relationships in some very odd situations. It is well written. Toltz describes the situations in complete detail. Some of the situations are ridiculous but make total sense based on the characters personalities, some funny situations and some ridiculously funny situations. It's very easy to immerse yourself in the story. Toltz does a good job of setting up the story starting out with setting up how these characters came to be and their genetic make up according to the stories told by the Father. The story is told in a fairly detailed and descriptive way. I do like the narrative style of this book.

Through these characters you get to travel to many different places. It's quite an adventure. It's a crazy zany story that just could happen. It's fiction in a non fiction way in that the story is well written and the characters are believable

This is an excellent fist novel that reads like a seasoned writer had written it.