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  • A Fraction of the Whole See large image

    A Fraction of the Whole (Paperback) By (author) Steve Toltz

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    Short Description for A Fraction of the WholeA memorable story of a father and son whose spiritual symmetry transcends all their many shortcomings, "A Fraction of the Whole" is an uproarious indictment of the modern world and its mores.
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  • Players without a stage3

    Sholto Spradbury There is lots to admire about this first novel, the saga of a family of misanthropes and renegades in a fairy-tale contemporary Australia, but it never quite fulfills its comic potential. Perhaps this is something to do with the portentous tone of the narrator, who from a prison cell begins a tell-all apologia of the lives of his infamous father and uncle, and sustains a weight of expectation I spent the rest of the book attempting to moderate.
    The anomaly of situating such impassioned existentialist outlaws in the land of the long weekend should have all sorts of satirical implications. Yet while I found all the characters meaty and touching, the world in which they move seems vague and driven by tenuous coincidence. There is no crucible for the dark pathos and radical postures of the Dean brothers, as if the Baader-Meinhof gang might have sprung out of rural NSW in the 1950s. The plight of Jasper, the narrator, is entirely more substantial, and as he alternates hilarious accounts of his nonconformist upbringing with brooding pop-philosophical discourse, a real affection develops.
    While the story may aspire to a human-condition universalism, it is inescapably a story about Australian culture. Of course this is an unsentimental portrayal, yet none of the vituperative characters express more than mild irony regarding their milieu, and there is none of the vicious insight of The Slap, or The Good Terrorist. by Sholto Spradbury

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