Escape into the Present: An Interview with Steve Toltz

By Dominic GreenNovember 2, 2015

Escape into the Present: An Interview with Steve Toltz

STEVE TOLTZ’S DEBUT NOVEL, a dark comedy called A Fraction of the Whole (2007), made the Man Booker shortlist. Flattering comparisons were made to Bellow, Kafka, Roth. Eight years passed. Toltz’s second novel, Quicksand, has just come out. It is a madcap tragedy, the story of a friendship that begins in adolescent hedonism and ends in murder, paralysis, and death. One friend, Liam Wilder, grows up to become a policeman. The other, Aldo Benjamin, never grows up, but burns out, and scorches those around him. And these are the jokes.


An Antipodean autodidact, Toltz is one of the few living writers worth their plaudits: he has a rare ear for the poetic and a mordant eye for the ridiculous. If that sounds uncomfortable — so was Toltz’s experience of sudden paralysis and slow recovery. When we spoke on the phone, he was at home in Brooklyn and preparing to begin his promotional tour.


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DOMINIC GREEN: Quicksand is a pleasure to read. Your writing is vivid, there’s music in your language. Yet the story is a tale of catastrophic failure and disintegration. When you were writing, did you find that you had to adapt your style to the story, or was there a complementary relationship between the two?


STEVE TOLTZ: I feel that one’s style is like one’s smell. I can exert my will on it to a certain extent; however, it is what it is, and it’s applied to whatever the story is. So I’m not quite sure about the idea that the story can dictate the style: the style is the voice of the author. If I have a comic style, and I’m writing about something horrific, then I guess the juxtaposition of the two gives a particular flavor. Whereas if I take that same style and apply it to a lighter story, it will have a different appeal.


The life of Aldo Benjamin is a slow-motion disaster. Your narration packs a tremendous amount of energy into every sentence, but the events have a slow-motion feel. It’s as if they’re slowed down by their own gravity, or as if we’re in a car accident.


I think with this book I did concentrate more on language than with A Fraction of the Whole. Even though the catastrophe happens in slow motion, I think that I slowed it down even more, by setting more time inside each moment.


We’re talking about time, accident, and mobility. I can’t help but be reminded of the illness that overtook you when you were writing A Fraction of the Whole.


I was walking down a street in Paris, where I was living at the time, and I had a spontaneous cervical spinal hemorrhage. It left me paralyzed. The following few months were spent in a Paris hospital and then in the spinal ward of a hospital in Sydney. I was told by doctors that it was unlikely that I’d walk again, or that they didn’t know if I would walk again, or that I wouldn’t walk again. So I learned wheelchair skills. I spent my days and nights with patients with spinal injuries. My girlfriend found us a wheelchair accessible house. Meanwhile I wiggled a toe. I got up on the bars. I got out of the chair. I learned to walk again.


How did those experiences affect this novel?


I think they probably permeate every page. Not only specifically, writing about paraplegia and utilizing my experiences with that particular unfortunate state, but the book is also about fears, and the realization of those fears, and suffering and what one does to avoid it, and how much time one spends contemplating it and living in fear. I was also interested in examining the idea of what’s worse — loneliness or suffering. And of course it turns out that a combination, suffering alone, is the worst of all. All of these questions bubbled out of my own experience and permeate the whole novel.


There’s a lot of very dark, very philosophical comedy in Aldo’s story.


There was the physical trauma that I went through, and there was also just living for a time in a spinal ward. Up to that point, I always thought of hospitals as places that you get sick, and you stay for a while. But once you’re there for more than a few weeks and it becomes your actual address (I had my mail sent there!), this sort of stuff takes on a different meaning. There’s people in hospital who’ve been there for six or seven months, and you’re surrounded by other people’s suffering. And no matter what horrific state you’re in, you look right beside you and see someone just slightly worse. You’re in agony and feeling sorry for your own self, and then there’s the realization that you’re still luckier than the person in the bed next to you, so you have this complicated thing where you have to feel grateful for your suffering. That’s the swirl of ideas and thoughts that happened to me then, and that soaks through this novel.


And what about Aldo Benjamin, this gripping, appalling protagonist, who’s obsessed with sickness, and who becomes a paraplegic? From where does Aldo come? Of course, he’s a figment, but he’s a figment from your imagination. Given the resemblance of experiences, how did you arrive at this character, who’s so intriguing and repulsive and tragic, and all at the same time?


This particular novel took six years. I think probably that it took three of those years to grow the Aldo of the book. I grew him in the lab, in a way. At first, I created a character that is afraid to be alone, and so he surrounds himself with friends. And then I drew him into this character that has particular fears — of sickness and of imprisonment — and, in order to avoid his fears as much as possible, who realizes that he needs money. This turns him into a pathological entrepreneur.


Then there’s also this question which interested me: is bad luck self-harm by another name?


I had already written part of this. Aldo came out of a character and a section that I’d cut out of my first novel. I’d written a novel of a thousand pages, sent it out, got a bunch of rejections, and realized I needed to edit it down. So I cut out this one character who had all these terrible things happen to him, whereas the rest of the characters brought on their misfortune. And then when I was developing Aldo, I kind of merged him with that character.


Aldo is not a hunger artist or an artist in paint or words, he’s a con artist, and a failed one. At one point in the novel, he falls in with a group of artists, and they don’t seem to be any better; without giving too much away, it’s Aldo who gets played. Running through the story is a thread about authenticity in art, and the business of art. Aldo quotes a piece of advice from Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, that if you want to be a writer, one should never get qualified at anything else.


That piece of advice is something that I believed in myself in my 20s. I had this clue that I wanted to make films or write. And I knew that if I had another qualification, a fallback career, I would end up falling back on it. So I spent that decade doing minimum-wage, unskilled things. As I describe in the novel, “I started at the bottom, and worked my way sideways.”


That was probably a better idea than going to graduate school, which is where many bookish people go if they can’t think of anything better to do with their 20s.


Right, that’s true. I loved my time at university, but I was very sick of it by my third year. In Australia, we didn’t have writing programs like they do now in the US. I never knew there was such a thing as an MFA, so that wasn’t an option.


So you had to do something useful with that decade of your life.


I didn’t have a plan. Sometimes, having a very bad sense of time can be an advantage. When I was working on my first novel, or trying to get a film made, I thought, “Well, this’ll only take six months.” And although I sort of failed for a decade, as I said, it wasn’t my plan to fail for a decade …


Well, it’s hardly failing, is it? It’s an apprenticeship. In most professions, it would be considered a period of training.


Sure, but I don’t think anybody really tells himself that at the time. When you’re writing a short story or first chapter of a novel, you think, “This is gonna work.” Otherwise, you wouldn’t want to start, I don’t think you would try.


Was there a point at which you didn’t want to try any more?


There was a point after I’d gotten out of hospital, having been paralyzed, and I was learning to walk again, and I was still only halfway through A Fraction of the Whole, and I needed to get a job. So I went back to one of my old jobs, which was working as a television extra. And the first job that I got was on some hospital TV drama — as a patient! My very first job was lying in bed again. I had to put on a hospital gown too. That was a weird and dark place.


It reminds me of what you say in Quicksand about the relationship between bad luck and self-harm: decisions become the facts of the life.


Absolutely.


When I was reading Quicksand, I kept thinking of the monologue in Lou Reed’s Street Hassle, where he says something like, for some people, “the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it, you know, it’s called bad luck.” We’re defined by desires and impulse decisions, which for Aldo means a catalog of disastrous decisions pursued with great intensity.


The thing is, when we have our disasters, they feel so personal that we get proprietary about the bad things that happen to us. We feel that our disasters make us unique, but in fact it’s our disasters, I think, that make us generic.


We use the word “career” to describe a linear professional progress, but the word “career” means to go forward in a dangerous, almost uncontrollable manner, to be propelled by forces beyond our control. And that’s what happens to your characters: the plot sets everything in motion, and there’s a pinball effect after an initial moment of impact and propulsion.


So how do you see the trajectory of your career, and your origins as an Australian? The reviewers compare you to American novelists, and especially American Jewish ones. Do you consider yourself part of Australian literature?


Peter Carey’s books were a big influence. Not specifically because they were Australian, but because they’re so imaginative and alive. But as I said, I haven’t done an MFA. I didn’t come from a culture of writers. I’d never even met a writer until I had published a book. For me, I guess my particular influences, or my school of writing, was just whatever reading path I happened down. And usually that was just bouncing from writer to writer. For example, Vonnegut led me back to Celine which led forward to Bukowski then backward in time to Fante who led me further back to Hamsun. It has nothing to do with geography. Geography for me is the least interesting way to categorize literature. I couldn’t think of a more meaningless way, for me anyway, to categorize different writers.


But you can say the Russian novelists are distinctly Russian. There’s a relationship between culture and geography, between language and mentality.


You could also say Graham Greene and Pablo Neruda are distinctly male. True. But so what? I think the history of literature is the history of idiosyncratic consciousness — whether I’m attracted to Dostoevsky or to Celine, Clarice Lispector or John Fante, Jane Bowles, Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller, or Thomas Bernhard — to me, it’s about the quality of the minds. That’s what we fall in love with. Dialect and culture and geography could be used to categorize it, but it’s not what I fall in love with.


You didn’t come out of the MFA culture, which produces so many writers these days, particularly in America. Is it possible to teach an idiosyncratic voice?


No, I don’t believe it’s possible to teach it, though I believe it’s possible to expose a writer to it, and possibly excite something into existence. As somebody who’s not in the MFA world, and has a fear of missing out, I think, “Wow, that would have been nice, to be surrounded by writers.” My only concern is that in the crucial years of formation, what you read is so important to the development of your own style and voice. There’s probably one great new book a year, but in those programs, you’re reading so much contemporary stuff that it might be detrimental.


Talking of who’s on and off the syllabus, when I was reading Quicksand, I was reminded at various points of Bellow, and Herzog especially.


Yes, there’s definitely Herzog there, and the very first four chapters of Henderson the Rain King too, before he goes to Africa. I really think of those as touchstone books, in the way of what the sentence can do. And also the work of John Cheever, but in a different kind of way: how a sentence can move story, character, and action, and contain a philosophical idea. In those types of books, the characters are having interesting thoughts. It’s something that suits me, and I enjoy reading it as well as writing it.


You’ve got that Bellovian relish for language.


A lot of writing, to me, is the pleasure principle. There are people who say they go off and read to escape. I write to escape. And not from the present, but from the past and the future — which is to say, from regret and dread. To escape is to be in the present. There’s something wonderful about writing, where you’re both in the present, in the moment, yet also in an imaginative fantasyland. So you get the best of both worlds.


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Dominic Green is a historian and critic.

LARB Contributor

Dominic Green is a historian and critic.

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