I enjoyed Steve Toltz’s Here Goes Nothing and decided to read one of his earlier novels. I chose Quicksand. It was interesting enough to finish (with a short bit of skimming), but overall it was disappointing.
The story is told by two longtime friends, Aldo and Liam. Aldo is a walking disaster. His goal in life is to get rich quick but his entrepreneurial adventures are all failures. Liam is a failed novelist who makes his living as a half-hearted cop. The two also fail at their marriages. Liam regretfully lets go of his wife but has a daughter who makes cameo appearances. Aldo is never able to get over his wife, Stella, an unsuccessful musician, although for a time he is also in love with Mimi, a mediocre photographer.
Liam has run out of potential topics for his writing but hits on the idea of using Aldo as his muse. Aldo’s life is such a bizarre string of unusual circumstances that it surely should make a good story. To some extent it does. The story is clever and, at times, the human tragedy is so over-the-top that it is painfully humorous. The problem is that there is actually very little coherent plot so most of the book is filler. Liam tells part of it and Aldo tells part of it. Their voices both strain for the utmost quirkiness and become indistinguishable. The wives’ and girlfriend’s voices also rely on the same forced quirkiness. The author indulges in long dialogues and monologues that devolve into lists. Some of them are a little funny. Some are quite funny. But when just piled on top of one another, they become tedious. (It’s as though the author’s strategy is to throw a large number of potential jokes out there and hope some of them stick.) The premise was a good one, but it just went on for too long. Overall, I’m glad I read Here Goes Nothing first, because I don’t think I would have read it if Quicksand had been my first Toltz book.
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