The Australian writer has lived through some dark things himself. In 2004 he spent several months in hospital in paralysis from a cervical spine haemorrhage. Doctors were not sure if he would walk again. Fortunately he recovered and his main take on that time now is a wry observation of how driven he is:“There’s no situation of distress so extreme that it interrupts my ability to create.”
His special brand of dark and dazzling humour burst on the world in 2008 with his first novel,the big and boldA Fraction of the Whole. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award and earned him comparisons to John Kennedy Toole and David Foster Wallace. His second novel,Quicksand (which features a paralysed character),won the Russell Prize,the Australian award for humour writing.
Now there’sHere Goes Nothing,published in Australia,Britain and the US,which Toltz says is the third in his “trilogy of fear” novels.Fraction was about fear of death;Quicksand was about fear of life and suffering;and the latest novel is about fear of what other people think of you. Which might seem a trivial fear by comparison with the first two,but Toltz observes it’s a major motivating factor in human behaviour,especially in our current climate of cancelling and shaming via social media. “We constantly put blame onto society and culture,whereas we need to take responsibility for ourselves. We just care too much.“
Although three of his books use plots and characters that have nothing to do with him,they are all a portrait of his own obsessions and fears,he says. He quotes the pessimistic Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran:“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
Toltz’s fiction is the one area in his life where he doesn’t have that fear of what people think of him:“I feel so insulated,while I’m writing,from the idea that other people will ever be reading it. The response is so out of my control there’s no point in putting any energy into worrying about it.” But what about when the book comes out? Does he read the reviews? “I’d like to say I don’t,but it’s the same way I look at Twitter and Instagram:it’s a dirty little habit that does absolutely nothing good for my soul,whether the review is positive or negative.”
Every Toltz novel pushes the envelope in some way,andHere Goes Nothing does it in his creation of an afterlife that is neither heaven nor hell,just a dismal place with some familiar features:poverty,overcrowding,a dysfunctional bureaucracy,riots and wars,McDonald’s and Starbucks and a bar called Bitter in Soul. Lost souls stumble about,still traumatised by their deaths. And there’s no release from mortality:you will die all over again.