I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and his troubled son), it is narrated by a pair of human catastrophes: a New South Wales police constable, Liam Wilder, who’s a failed novelist; and his best friend, Aldo Benjamin, who’s a failed husband, entrepreneur, everything. Toltz probably intended this novel to be a failure. It’s that difficult beast, his second book, after all (his first made the shortlists of the Man Booker and the Guardian First Book Award).
He’s also Australian, and there’s nothing an Australian loathes more than the thought of a successful Australian. So Toltz (who’s now upped sticks to Brooklyn) has evidently called time on his own literary success and decided to cut himself down to size, with a novel that promises comic gold dust in its opening 20 pages and spends the next 400 pages scattering it to the wind.
Toltz starts the book — such a tease — brilliantly. Liam has come to visit his recently paroled childhood friend Aldo in a surfer’s resort. Aldo is a paraplegic (failed suicide attempt). Liam is an accidental policeman (part of a failed novel-writing attempt; he joined the force for research, never finished the book, now he’s stuck as a copper). Sitting with his hapless friend, he realises the truth he has always failed to grasp: Aldo, the great Australian one-man disaster, is the perfect material for a novel.
As Aldo wibbles on about his calamitous life, Liam suddenly can’t scribble notes fast enough.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in