Book review – Quicksand by Steve Toltz
Before I talk about this kinetic, lunatic, uproarious, tragic and brilliant novel, a health warning. I picked up Quicksand at my favourite indie bookstore Love Books, not because I had heard of the book or author (a Booker shortlister for a few years back, as it turns out), but because the back page book description was so compelling that I simply took a chance, relying on the curatorial excellence of Kate Rogan, the bookshop proprietor. I then took the book on a family holiday, and here is the warning – after I gave it to Kate Sidley (my wife) on the plane, she shortly thereafter started howling so loudly and so without decorum or restraint that I feared the air stewards (glancing at her worriedly) would request a return to the airport to have her removed. You will, I guarantee, be undone with helpless shrieking in many of the unlikely scenes and conversations that scattershot this virtuoso act.
But Quicksand is not really a comedy; one’s frequent laughter is black and horrified. It is a deeply poignant and profound character study of one Aldo Benjamin, a character unlike any whom you have ever met in fiction or life, and will be unlikely ever to forget. The book is told in the first person by Aldo’s best friend Liam, who tries to mine Aldo’s compulsive and exhausting aphorisms and pithy observations and trenchant asides and explosive commentaries on everything and anything in order to find fodder for Liam’s dream of writing a novel (although some devious literary trickery also puts Aldo into the first person for a large swath of the book). These ‘Aldoisms’ burst out of every page like tracer fire, and I found myself saying over and over again – god, that’s genius, god, that’s incandescent, god, that’s hysterical, until I had nearly overdosed with giddy surprise.
The book begins with Aldo in a wheelchair, paraplegic and recently out of jail. The first part of this book is how he got to this point, and the second part plots his and everyone else’s reaction to his circumstances. Aldo is as large a disaster of a human being has you can imagine. Every decision, act, attempt, hope, relationship or initiative that he has ever undertaken has been spectacularly ill-advised, all ending in crashing and cacophonous disaster. From primary school to adulthood, his life has been one long, loud, drawn out failure. I wrote a novel a few years ago about a man beset by misfortune, the story of Job updated to an urban setting. But Toltz takes this to entirely uncharted territory. The reader is left just aghast at Aldo’s spectacular and endless fuck-ups, all by his own misstep and poor judgement. And the deft trick played by the author is that you are relieved that you do not know anyone remotely like this, and yet you are deeply seduced by him, caring greatly about his fate with your heart firmly in your mouth.
The book pivots vertiginously between riotous, sad, philosophical, erudite and chilling (there is a description of a prison scene that I wish I had I had never read, because I cannot unread it now, and it will reside unwelcomely and repellently in my head forever). There are long blocks of dialogue between Aldo and Liam which leave the reader utterly exhilarated and exhausted. And it never lets up – page after page after chapter after chapter of high-wire writing – sometimes shockingly insightful, sometimes deeply moving, always fresh and unpredictable and beautifully rendered.
I am aware that this review has not really described what the book is about, and that is not really plot-driven. It is more a stomach-churning journey with the hapless but magnetic Aldo as he ruins every last shred of his life, and the desperate attempts of those around him to temper his excesses, to feed off his rare and raw wisdom and to keep him close even as they avoid their eyes from looking at his bloody and continual train wreck.
There is little I can compare this book to, although the author states his influences – Bellow, Roth, Woody Allen. Toltz tears great new ragged holes in the literature of art, suicide, friendship, sex, violence, psychology, disability and the worst slings and arrows of misfortune. The books is not perfect – there were a few parts which I felt were overindulgent (including Aldo’s overly long discussion with a voice in his head), but against the overwhelming pleasures elsewhere, it seems churlish to complain.
Highest recommendation, and a small bet that Quicksand will be all over the next awards season.