A Fraction of the Whole: A Novel

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From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. At the heart of this sprawling, dizzying debut from a quirky, assured Australian writer are two men: Jasper Dean, a judgmental but forgiving son, and Martin, his brilliant but dysfunctional father. Jasper, in an Australian prison in his early 20s, scribbles out the story of their picaresque adventures, noting cryptically early on that [m]y father's body will never be found. As he tells it, Jasper has been uneasily bonded to his father through thick and thin, which includes Martin's stint managing a squalid strip club during Jasper's adolescence; an Australian outback home literally hidden within impenetrable mazes; Martin's ill-fated scheme to make every Australian a millionaire; and a feverish odyssey through Thailand's menacing jungles. Toltz's exuberant, looping narrative—thick with his characters' outsized longings and with their crazy arguments—sometimes blows past plot entirely, but comic drive and Toltz's far-out imagination carry the epic story, which puts the two (and Martin's own nemesis, his outlaw brother, Terry) on an irreverent roller-coaster ride from obscurity to infamy. Comparisons to Special Topics in Calamity Physics are likely, but this nutty tour de force has a more tender, more worldly spin. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008 “_A Fraction of the Whole_ is that rarest of long books– utterly worth it ...The story starts in a prison riot and ends on a plane, and there is not one forgettable episode in between...It reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus... This book moves; it bucks and rocks in a world that feels more than a hemisphere away...So comically dark and inviting that you have no choice but to step into its icy wake.” —_Esquire “Rollicking...laugh-out-loud funny.” — Entertainment Weekly_ _ _“A rich father-and-son story packed with incident, humor, and characters reminiscent of the styles of Charles Dickens and John Irving ...Occasionally, a big, sprawling first novel fights its way into print with a flourish, at which point its ambition and the eccentricities of its ‘firstness’ can become its best marketing tools. Such is the case with A Fraction of the Whole , a book that is willfully misanthropic and very funny...like Irving, Toltz makes minor characters leap off the page ...He’s a superb, disturbing phrasemaker...this long novel, which lives or dies in the brilliance of its writing, has a subtle, compelling structure..._A Fraction of the Whole_ soars like a rocket .” —_Los Angeles Times_ _ _“Combines the hilarious high-low reference points of early Martin Amis with the annihilating punk inventiveness of Chuck Palahniuk.” —_Best Life _“One of the best books I’ve ever read. A Fraction of the Whole is better than The Corrections , and Toltz did it in one book while it took Franzen two to get The Corrections out into the world. Granted, you have your whole life to write your first novel, but my God, A Fraction of the Whole does things that most writers can’t do in a lifetime... A wildly addictive exploration into a man’s soul, a profoundly moving experience almost religious in its execution and possibly one of the sharpest and irresistibly humorous post-modern adventures I’ve had the pleasure to read... Steve Toltz has written a masterpiece, a smashing debut that will long be remembered as a colossal example of just how good fiction can be . He keeps you wired to the page from the jump and he defies gravity all the way to the end.” —Ain’t It Cool News “First novels these days too seldom dare to raise their voices above an elegant whisper or an ironic murmur. Not so A Fraction of the Whole , a riotously funny first novel that is harder to ignore than a crate of puppies , twice as playful and just about as messy. This is not a book to be read so much as an experience to be wallowed in. Mr. Toltz’s merry chaos–a mix of metaphysi