10 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
The first
book is about
fear of death,
the second
about fear of
life. This is
about fear of
other people’s
opinions
W
hat is the after-
life like? Maybe
sketchy notions
of wafty clouds
and plinking
harps float into
your mind. Per-
haps, if you have a darker personality,
Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of Hell will be
conjured up — wretched humans being
imaginatively tortured and molested and
generally bothered by demons and
animal-faced men. Perhaps it’s just a
blank, an endless nothingness, a perpetual
Sunday afternoon drizzle.
But what if the afterlife is much like the
beforelife? A big disappointment. The
showers don’t have decent water pressure,
the jobs are boring (who wants to make
umbrellas?) and there is a lot of paperwork
(where’s your Interim Death Certificate?).
Sex is still underwhelming and urinary
tract infections are a fact of death.
And what if the creaking infrastructure
of the afterlife is under pressure because of
a new influx of dead, a mass arrival thanks
to a global pandemic? And what if none of
the big questions — Why are we here? Is
there a God? Where did I put my house
keys? — are answered when you pass into
the big yonder?
That’s the premise of a new novel,
Here Goes Nothing, by Steve Toltz, who in
his three books (alas, too few) has shown
that he is one of the funniest and most
original writers at work today. When we
speak — by Zoom because he’s an Austra-
lian in Los Angeles — he cheerfully
bemoans our “utter failure of imagination
when it comes to the afterlife. In thou-
sands of years we haven’t innovated much.
It’s still Heaven or Hell, purgatory and lim-
bo — it’s either a reward or a punishment.
No matter the version, there is always a
hierarchy and it always makes sense: when
you get there, you are going to get some
kind of answer [to the meaning of exis-
tence]. So I wanted to write a novel where
the mysteries are multiplied.”
And that he does — with plenty of gags
(“I thought the afterlife was for those who
couldn’t abide ultimatums”; two people
with a confused sex life are “f***ing at
crossed purposes”), flights of fancy and
tongue-in-cheek philosophising.
The novel is about reformed bad boy
Angus Mooney who is murdered by a mor-
tally ill man who has become infatuated
with his girlfriend, Gracie, a marriage cele-
brant with unusual patter (“I now diag-
nose you husband and wife”) and original
relationship advice (“Deciding what to eat
will constitute three quarters of your mar-
riage, so when it comes to menus, always
state strong preferences”). Mooney is a
sceptic about anything spiritual, but what
about Toltz?
“I am not a religious person. I did my bar
mitzvah, kicking and screaming, and then
promptly dropped the whole business,” he
tells me. Yet this self-described “neurotic
Jew” does admit that his style “fits into the
Jewish tradition of relentless questioning”.
He calls his three novels a “fear trilogy”,
each expressing a different part of that
emotion. His first, A Fraction of the Whole,
a sprawling, madcap novel about a son’s
odd relationship with his misanthropic,
Really, who cares if
people are offended?
philosophising father, “the most hated
man in Australia”, was shortlisted for the
Booker prize in 2008. His follow-up was
better still: Quicksand in 2015 followed the
life of a serial loser, failed get-rich-quick
entrepreneur Aldo Benjamin, “the kind of
man you might come across sharing ciga-
rettes in an alleyway with a masturbating
hobo”. By the end of his life, this latter-day
Job has a tattoo, a tribute to his tiredness,
that reads: “Do Not Resuscitate, I Mean It.”
“The first book is about fear of death,”
Toltz says, “the second about fear of life
[and suffering] and this one I wanted to be
about fear of the opinions of other people.
The fear of the opinions of other people,
it’s everywhere and amplified by social
media to the nth degree. There is a whole
genre of self-help books such as The Subtle
Art of Not Giving a F*** because people
recognise they care too much.”
His books are death-obsessed — sui-
cide, accidental death, murder and abor-
tions always pop up. “We all know that we
are going to die, that we are mortal, yet we
are so self-consumed we need reminding.
I think about the Romans and Greeks
bringing corpses to the banquet to remind
them,” he tells me.
It’s not so hard to see why his novels
flicker with intimations of the utter frailty
of human life. In the middle of writing his
first novel, he suddenly became paralysed.In 2004, while walking down a Paris street,
where he was living at the time, he suffered
a spasm of pain. He got back to his home,
where he collapsed, brought low by a spi-
nal cord haemorrhage.
“The doctors said I wasn’t going to walk
again, but there was a slow recovery, from
wheelchair to walker, then crutches, then
a cane. It was almost a year before I got rid
of the cane and walked again.”
That was not the first time Toltz was
hospital-struck. “I had some childhood
illnesses as well. Maybe my first memories
of life are about hospital. Being left at
night in a ward, hearing the nurses walk
around, being alone in a hospital. I’m sure
these incidents informed my preoccupa-
tion with death.”
Toltz was born with a condition that ne-
cessitated surgery on his skull when he
was three months old and when he was six.
“It’s left me with regular, chronic head-
aches. It’s only been 44 years; I’m getting
used to it,” he says with a laugh.
He seems like an affable, easygoing chap
and speaks in a matter-of-fact way about
these unpleasant events, although that
chilled quality could be because he has an
Aussie accent — he was born in Sydney in
1972 — and that usually makes people
sound horizontal. So have random para-
lysis and brushes with illness given him
any wisdom?interview
His insight is “the persistence of human
personality”. Of his fellow recovering
patients, “the optimistic people were still
optimistic, the people who were grumpy
and mean-spirited were still grumpy and
mean-spirited. Nobody really changes
from their life-changing experiences.”
Toltz seems to have enjoyed a lot of life.
He is nomadic. After living in Sydney (Aus-
tralia, by the way, is described by one char-
acter as a “a stupid place where 20-plus
million people boast about being ordi-
nary”), he settled for times in Paris, New
York and now LA, where he lives with
his ten-year-old son (his private life is
“complicated”). He had stints in Barcelona
teaching English, as well as San Francisco
and Montreal.
His twenties were a period of drift —
jobs in telemarketing, trying his hand at
screenwriting, being a cameraman, work-
ing as a TV extra (his first gig after his para-
lysis was to play a bed-bound patient in a
hospital drama). As he says, “I started at
the bottom and worked my way sideways.”
The one constant was his love of writing
— “My default hobby. I didn’t draw. I
wasn’t big on sports.” His first big influence
was Roald Dahl. He remembers loving his
children’s books, then moving on to his
“nasty misanthropic stories”, such as the
collection Switch Bitch, these “great por-
traits of obsessive characters”. He had been
entering short story competitions (unsuc-
cessfully), but realised that two of his sto-
ries provided him with the opening and
closing of his first novel.
So aged 29 he made the plunge despite
“not having met an author until I had been
actually published”.
Novelists are a singular bunch and the
ones that succeed have to be content to go
their own way. “You have to live with the
fact that you will fail for years,” he says. “To
become a writer is to be a loser for a while.
You have to work out how to rationalise
that and be OK with it.”
The publishing trade is in a nervous
period, frightened of controversy or of-
fence. Toltz, who can be breezily offensive
— “Hitler brought his A-game to the geno-
cide” is a throwaway line in Quicksand — is
not worried. “It all comes down to the
pleasure that I get from writing. I write to
make myself laugh. I don’t censor myself. I
don’t think I have ever cut anything out
because I thought it was too much.”
What about social media? The place
where mobs gather to cancel those who
have bad thoughts. “We don’t need to hear
from everybody. I don’t think democrati-
sation of speech is a particularly good
thing... Twitter is a cesspit. Humanity has
gone down a very wrong path. A planet
addicted to a toxic substance. We are going
to have to get off it.”
What about sensitivity readers? “As long
as a writer is free to reject the notes from a
sensitivity reader, I see no problem with it,
[but] I can’t imagine being subjected to it
myself.” He is more taken with the idea of
insensitivity readers who would encour-
age freewheeling naughtiness — “This
isn’t offensive enough, can you ramp it up
a bit?”
“The book comes down hard on giving
much credence to subjectivity. Just
because you are offended, does not make
you right. The appropriate response to ‘I’m
offended’ is, ‘Who cares?’ Really, who
cares? There are people offended by inter-
racial marriage. It is of absolutely no con-
sequence that people are offended.”
His motto seems to be: “It made me
laugh so I kept it in.” I’ll leave you with
another bit of Toltzian wisdom, taken from
Quicksand. “If your only tool is a penis,
every problem looks like a vagina.”
Here Goes Nothing is published by
Sceptre on May 3 at £18.99The comic novelist
Steve Toltz tells
Robbie Millen
about imagining the
afterlife and why
Twitter is a ‘cesspit’
NIGEL BUCK