Novel about death is gravely funny
Here Goes Nothing
Steve Toltz
Melville House
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 humour of a condemned race.
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 catalogue 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. The grave has clarified one important theological point — if only by failing to bring everything to a close. In life, Angus admits, he 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 pipe dream.”
Angus is — was? — a petty criminal who'd finally settled down, more or less, with a quirky woman named Gracie. Theirs was a marriage of opposites. Angus harboured 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 the whole pantheon of spirituality — from Ganesh and the Virgin to ghosts and angels. For a living, she performs ironic marriage ceremonies: half roast, half blessing — somewhere between throwing rice and knives.
In the opening pages of the novel, 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 that he used to live in her house. His dying wish is to be allowed to pass away here 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, wondering how her husband died, 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 power lines 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 ordinariness of it was faintly distressing,” Angus says. “I sat there, straining, thinking, Really? This again?”