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Book Reviewed by: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.
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).
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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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.
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