Steve Toltz
An unheard of first advance announces a prodigious new talent
Toltz exploits family friction in A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz's sprawling, chaotic debut
novel A Fraction of the Whole has
ushered in a fresh new voice in
Australian writing. Already being
fêted globally as a talent for the long
run, Toltz secured a cool $100,000
advance for the book, released to
great hype this month. He talks to Time Out's Richard Cooke about
his mobile work habits, empathising
with pariahs, and how Nazis
influenced his writing.
What was the genesis of A Fraction of the Whole? People always say write what you know, but I've always found that to be terrible advice. It's quite limiting, what you know. Whatever started me was kind of empathy and imagination, and you can't always choose who you empathise with. I often sympathise with people who everyone else hated. Whenever someone was getting a rough time in the newspapers - usually they deserved it - but I'd think 'What if that was your dad, or brother?' And I thought there was a story in that. I'd originally written a couple of short stories with these characters, and sort of realised that there was a beginning and an end to a story, and I thought I'd just extend the middle.
And the middle expanded more than you expected it to. I certainly didn't set out to write a 700-page book. I was always sort of convinced I had another 100 pages to go, or another six months, throughout the whole four years that I took to write it - and it just kept going. I'm a slow writer, so it took that amount of time for the story to evolve. It's a slow, tortuous process with eureka moments; about one eureka moment every two months.
Tell us a bit about your process. I don't think too far ahead, certainly each day I kind of have a place that I try to get to. I don't really like my process; I certainly wouldn't recommend it. It has produced a book, but it's also quite painful. I write in kind of two-hour blocks, and I've got into the habit of writing on the move.
I don't really have an office or anything and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a café, back to the library, that kind of thing. I break the story down, and just try to do it in chunks and put it together afterwards.
Do you think in Australia there's an expectation that a novel of this size has to have some kind of great political importance? I think you're probably right, but I was kind of writing this in a vacuum when it comes to Australian literature. I wasn't thinking of any other book - I was just thinking of this book. I can only be myself as a writer, and this was all I could do; I couldn't be more serious or less jokey... My influences were just spread all over the shop, and all over the time map as well, so I wasn't thinking about the current contemporary Australian works of this nature or anything like that. I was just trying to get the story out.
What were you reading when you were writing it? There were a number of writers I discovered while writing, and they definitely influenced the process. The Norwegian author Knut Hamsun: Hunger, Pan and Mysteries were the three books I really loved. And Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Death on An Instalment Plan and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.
Céline and Hamsun were both Nazis. Is that a coincidence? It's a bit of bad luck that he [Hamsun] ended up giving his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels, but I haven't quite made up my mind about all of that. For me it's just a coincidence, they both still describe human nature and human spirit in
a way that I don't think has been done before and I still don't think it has been described since.
Was reading crackpots useful for writing about crackpots? These are outsiders, so pessimistic that it's funny. Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration. They are people who are also not following by the rules: they're questioning values, just not accepting anything at all. My characters, one in the book says, man is the worst thing that happened to humanity' and I think that's the truth.
So are you a pessimist? I guess that depends upon what day you ask, and whether it's the morning or afternoon. Or whether I'm feeling pessimistic or optimistic in that moment, and in which way. It's impossible; it's a shifting thing. You know I'm often... my characters views are an exaggeration of what I'm thinking, and sometimes what I'm not thinking. Often they're views in which I believe, and while believing it, I also believe that the opposite is equally true. So I can't really pin it down.
Had you attempted a novel before? I had my first time at trying a novel when I was 12, and I only got about two chapters in. Embarrassingly, it was very similar to the movie Bruce Almighty. Luckily I abandoned it, but imagine my surprise when the movie came out, and I had written it when I was 12. And then I tried another one 10 years later and that one again lasted about three chapters and then a third one lasted about half a chapter, and finally this one which I started when I was about 29, and finally finished age 34.
Did you have a feeling this was going to be the one? Every time you start, you start with this wild optimism otherwise you'd never put pen to paper. But usually that optimism kind of wanes after about a week, whereas this time it kept going. I just think it was the right time to do it, more than this necessarily being the right book. Also, I had some kind of ambition for it and wanted to finish it and wanted to sell it. I wanted to try to make some money. I wanted it to be finished. And as it happened, I really fell in love with the characters and I think that's the key to be able to spend a long time with a certain project. You have to have a good reason to go back every day, and it just happened that I never got sick of them.
A Fraction of the Whole ($35) is published by Hamish Hamilton on 3 March.