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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2015, 368 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2016, 368 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Darcie R.J. Abbene
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A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends.
Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.
With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world - including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award - Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.
Two Friends, Two Agendas (one hidden)
DOWN AT THE FOAMY SHORELINE, where small tight waves explode against black rocks, a lifeguard with feet wedged in the wet and vaguely tangerine sand stands shirtless like a magnificent sea-Jesus. An ill-timed journey into a breaker knocks a boy on his little back. A bald man throws a tennis ball for his Labrador and a second, unrelated dog bounds in after it. Through a gauze of mist a brunette—tall, and from where we're sitting seemingly riddled with breasts—kicks water on the sunlit torso of her blond companion.
There are three other drinkers in the place, already tethered to the sunbleached bar. It is eleven a.m. Slumped in his cumbersome mechanized wheelchair that squeaks somewhere down by the left back wheel when he's doing pressure lifts, Aldo squints out from sand-whipped windows into the tumor of searing light. He turns to me and says, "I'm nobody's muse."
I think: That's a great line right there. I take ...
The novel has a timeline that is sometimes difficult to follow because it jumps back and forth in time, as well as switches between Aldo and Liam’s points of view. It also changes formats from straight narration, to a transcription of a police interview, to a manuscript of Liam’s book, to a defense monologue from a court trial. All of these are dappled with Aldo's distracting and sometimes endless - though thoroughly entertaining and character developing - rants. But the comedic way Toltz navigates some pretty serious subjects (rape, murder, death, prostitution, and suicide to name a few), carries the reader through the unsteady timeline. To be clear, Toltz isn’t making light of these subjects. But his humor does allow for some kind of literary slapstick, which lightens the read...continued
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(Reviewed by Darcie R.J. Abbene).
Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names
Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel; it is life, literature at its fullest. Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
There are more lines of genius on one page of Quicksand than in the entirety of many very respectable novels. Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of Amnesia
The energy, the hairpin turns, the narrative crashes, the stomach churning ascents and trashed taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent. Stefan Merrill Block, bestselling author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door
What would happen if some genius were able to unite the high-wattage storytelling exuberance of Kurt Vonnegut, the combustive glee of Walt Whitman, and the reality-smashing despair of Franz Kafka? Impossibly, Steve Toltz has done just that, turning out a new masterpiece that is at once an old-fashioned page-turner, a tragicomic lament for the digital age, and an aching howl at the intractable existential dilemmas of our poor species.
Though there is no literal quicksand in Steve Toltz's novel, his main character, Aldo Benjamin, is consistently trapped in a metaphorical quicksand. He struggles through many varieties of bad luck, but that classic epitome of bad luck - getting stuck in quicksand - might not spell the certain death that some think.
According to Scientific American, a mass of sand particles is typically 25-30% air or water. The types of sand particles that make up quicksand, however, are a little different; they are more elongated in their shape, and don't fit together as
neatly. Thus, up to 70% of quicksand is filled with air or water. Quicksand becomes dangerous when a vibration or stress causes the elongated grains to collapse against each other ...
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