San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Drab existence of dead narrator gravely funny
Limping through a worldwide pandemic spiked with fresh threats of nuclear war, you may be craving a book to cheer you up.
Look away!
Steve Toltz’s grim comic novel “Here Goes Nothing” hangs on the gallows humor of a whole condemned race. Every copy of this book should come with a starter dose of Prozac.
An Australian author who lives in Los Angeles, Toltz attracted an international audience with his chaotic debut, “A Fraction of the Whole,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008. His second novel, “Quicksand,” also careened through an absurd catalog of misfortunes. And now with “Here Goes Nothing,” he’s taken his misanthropic shtick into the Great Beyond.
We meet the narrator, Angus, when he’s already dead. In life, An was sure that “the very notion of an immortal soul was only a way to avoid facing our imminent trip to Nowhere. It’s humiliating how wrong you can be.”
This is a comedy that takes the tragedy of immortality seriously. It flips the fear of oblivion on its head to meditate on the terrifying suspicion that “the abyss of eternal nothingness was just a pipedream.”
Angus is — was? — a petty criminal who’d finally settled down, more or less, with a quirky woman named Gracie. Angus harbored bitter skepticism. “People are always trying to count your blessings for you,” he says, “but their arithmetic is way off.”
Gracie, meanwhile, cultivates a deep faith in spirituality — from Ganesh and the Virgin to ghosts and angels. For a living, she performs ironic marriage ceremonies: half roast, half blessing.
In the opening pages, a new virus has leaped from dogs to human beings and is dragging its scythe around the globe. An old man comes to the door and convinces Gracie he used to live in this house. His dying wish is to be allowed to pass away in these familiar rooms. Being an old softy, Gracie agrees, but Angus can see through this scheme. So the stranger kills him.
Trouble is, that’s not the end of this novel — or of Angus. While his widow carries on bravely, Angus finds himself in an afterlife that looks like a depressed town in the 1970s. “Who would conceive of a place so banal?” Angus wonders. “There were powerlines and storm drains and
stop signs and garbage trucks and pot holes and men catcalling women.”
No philosopher, no religion, no Renaissance painter had come close to predicting this drab netherworld. Confronted by a seamless continuation of the same political, social and personal absurdity they endured in life, these souls grow jealous of “zombies with their outdoor living and their simple diets.”
There is no ambrosia here, just bad coffee. Instead of getting wings and a harp, Angus is assigned to a job in an umbrella factory. “We had wasted our lives,” he thinks. “Must we waste our deaths too?” And, worst of all, he’s still depressed and constipated.
The worldwide pandemic and our bungling efforts to control it aren’t the story’s only contemporary allusions. There’s a veiled swipe at the MAGA crowd when the dead folks violently object to the arrival of“immigrants” from the other side. And people even get sick here — but at least there’s free medical care in the afterlife.
Beneath its wry surface, “Here Goes Nothing” is a relentless deconstruction of religious certainty and spiritual affirmation. The insight and clarity that so many faith traditions promise on the other side is burned away.
But a plot about the eternally static nature of reality risks being infected by its own lack of progress. I kept running up against a question: What does this mound of philosophical pessimism amounts to? It’s hard to shake the impression that Toltz and Angus are spinning on the same ground.
Behind this dark comedy, though, lies a wry rejection of the hope that death will either snuff us out or make us better by serving justice, solace, salvation, revelation, something. In Toltz’s pages, imperishability doesn’t convey any transformation at all. Improving ourselves is still and forever up to us alone.