“My mind was a tour de force of what the fuck.” says Angus Mooney, the narrator and protagonist of Steve Toltz’s mind tilting novel, HERE GOES NOTHING. He could well be commenting on the book itself.
Angus has been murdered and wakes up in the afterlife, a bit embarrassing as he had eschewed such an existence. Embittering too, because Angus was just getting his life in order, finding love at last in his forties, with Gracie, with whom he had recently sired a child.
Their happy home of future family is visited on by a diseased fogey named Owen Fogel claiming that their dwelling is the house he grew up in and would consequently like to die in. He makes them an offer to let him board until he is as stiff as a board.
Goodhearted Gracie allows the terminally ill former doctor to make their home his terminus, but the tumor is slow growing, his tumescent yearning for her gathering apace, and the hospice becomes the scene of homicide.
HERE GOES NOTHING could easily go under the alternative title, Here Comes Something, so full of fizzing philosophical musings and meanderings.
“When I was alive I always wanted to die in my sleep. That made me feel ashamed now. How ludicrous to want to die without noticing it while never realising that you had lived without noticing it too.” laments Angus, as he contemplates a beige afterlife without his widow and orphaned fetus.
The after life depicted here is a bureaucratic limbo, a governmental purgatory, sporting post traumatic death disorder support groups, and where real life frustrations just as readily manifest.
“I disliked when anyone tried to give me knowledge non-consensually, I wanted to protect my innocence the most underrated of the human rights…it’s a mortifying spectacle of unbearable pomposity.”
HERE GOES NOTHING is a cosmic suspense novel where the comic, the cosmic and suspense merge just as seamlessly as the corporeal and the discarnate dimensions merge. A delight from page one, the dialogue is sharp and funny, the characters well drawn and memorable, hooking you from the first sentence with no release till the last word.
The narrator, Angus Mooney, is a wonderfully misguided guide through the labyrinth of physical and metaphysical occurrences, an every man swinging on occult’s pendulum.
The book’s most glorious creation is Gracie, Mooney’s spouse, a wedding celebrant way left of field, a sort of literary love child of the preacher in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders.
She officiates at ceremonies with healthily cynical sermons like, “What is love even for? That’s easy. The redistribution of the burden of living. It emerges as the by product of intimacy. Should we bother with it? That’s not entirely clear.”
A social media maven, she is also a conduit for commentary on the phenomenon: “It was easy to weaponize people’s inability to hear a dissenting view; she was hemorrhaging friends and followers at a dizzying rate. She had lost her entire friend group in one evening, all 5000 of them except one., who shared a rant. And when she woke the next day, Gracie had 47,503. She posted; the greatest fear of being unmasked is that it often reveals an identical face underneath.”
Crazy yet convincing, Toltz melds ephemeral situations with physical and emotional depth by outrageous yet sustainable storytelling through nearly 400 pages, skirting the mundane and collaring the unusual, creating a remarkably tender gem that is weirdly touching.
HERE GOES NOTHING by Steve Toltz is published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton
