Here's my problem: Pretty much every time I get to the last 50 pages of a long novel, I wonder, What the hell did I read this for? All that time. All the lost hours. You can almost feel veins pulsing in the writer's temples. Yet for some reason, I take a look at the first page anyhow, because somewhere inside I am convinced that long books must still matter. Maybe this one will be worth it, I hope -- then I go in, falling to my knees, belly down under the pages.
Well, A Fraction of the Whole (Spiegel & Grau, $25), by Australian Steve Toltz, is that rarest of long books -- utterly worth it -- which is why you'll have to bear with me on portents of this next line: This book is witty and intellectual, a physical comedy and literary rant all at once. The year is two months old. But this is the book of a two-month-old year. It may well carry the whole thing.
The story starts in a prison riot and ends on a plane, and there is not one forgettable episode in between, as a son tells the pop-pop-pop story of his criminally, lovingly insane father and their bizarre adventures flopping forward toward death, toward prison, toward Paris, and back; it reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus. It's an episodic story, kite-strung with mind fucks. This book moves; it bucks and rocks in a world that feels more than a hemisphere away, a world where the crispy black shadow of 9/11 does not inform every word from the mouths of geniuses and the evolution of one man, let alone a planet. All 544 pages are so comically dark and inviting that you have no choice but to step forward into its icy wake.
