BOOKS: Mindwandering, Moonshot and a long-awaited novel

AVIVA LOWY delves into Steve Tolz's long-awaited new novel, Diane Armstrong's latest and a non-fiction selection that canvases many aspects of success.

Here Goes Nothing - Steve Toltz (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)

Angus Mooney, the narrator of Here Goes Nothing, is dead. And to make matters worse, his wife, Gracie, is unwittingly living with his murderer in their family home. That’s the set-up for Australian Steve Toltz’s hilarious satire - eagerly awaited by his fans since his last book seven years ago - which pokes fun at both the living and our concept of what comes after we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Mooney is an anti-hero who has grown up in a series of foster homes and dabbles in petty crime. The one good thing in his life has been Gracie, a wedding celebrant who is in high demand for her novel shtick: telling the couple that marriage is a disaster and it will all end in tears.

The embarrassing surprise for the newly-dead Mooney, an atheist, is that there is an afterlife. But unlike most versions of it touted by believers, it’s pretty much like life back on earth. There’s a housing crisis with the huge influx of “refugees” from the unprecedented pandemic, arguments about which dead should be shunted to the margins of the community, insurgencies and threats of violent suppression. Mooney’s own ‘living conditions’ go from intolerable to untenable.

Death is the unhappy everafter. Enemies are not vanquished and our petty selfishness just continues on in another realm. Toltz takes the nebulous religious ideal of heaven to its logical conclusion. Why would we flawed individuals expect our (non)existence to change things?

Read as philosophy, humorous social commentary, or rollicking good story, you’ll enjoy the ride.