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A review by nina_reads_books
Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz
3.0
I’m trying to catch up on reviews as I've been powering through the books this month so this one is from a couple of weeks ago. I listened to Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz on audiobook and while it was enjoyable enough I finished it feeling like I wasn’t sure what the point was.
The book focuses on Angus who has had a pretty hard life with his parents abandoning him as an infant, living in foster care to becoming a petty criminal as a young and not so young adult. Eventually though he meets and falls in love with quirky marriage celebrant Gracie. The couple are living happily trying for a baby when a stranger appears at the door and inserts himself into their life. It’s not a spoiler to say that Angus ends up dead and in an afterlife of sorts. The story then follows both Angus as he grapples with the randomness and bureaucratic insanity of the new place he finds himself in and Gracie as she struggles with her grief over losing her husband.
Throw in a worldwide pandemic (funnily enough set after our most recent pandemic which it references) which has the population in the afterlife growing exponentially with disastrous consequences for living arrangements and some interesting experiences for Gracie as the pandemic takes hold in Australia and you have what was billed as “a wildly inventive and savagely funny novel about love and mortality”.
To some degree this is what I experienced. There were certainly some amusing parts and the administrative organisation of the afterlife was reminiscent of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida which made for some wryly funny situations. But the novel did start losing me towards the end as the situations become ridiculous and kind of shocking actually. Gracie is really full on and I didn’t find her as quirkily endearing as I think she was supposed to be. There are ghosts, there are philosophical musings about where we go when we die and faith in general but honestly I just don’t know what the point of it all was?
So not a total win for me.
The book focuses on Angus who has had a pretty hard life with his parents abandoning him as an infant, living in foster care to becoming a petty criminal as a young and not so young adult. Eventually though he meets and falls in love with quirky marriage celebrant Gracie. The couple are living happily trying for a baby when a stranger appears at the door and inserts himself into their life. It’s not a spoiler to say that Angus ends up dead and in an afterlife of sorts. The story then follows both Angus as he grapples with the randomness and bureaucratic insanity of the new place he finds himself in and Gracie as she struggles with her grief over losing her husband.
Throw in a worldwide pandemic (funnily enough set after our most recent pandemic which it references) which has the population in the afterlife growing exponentially with disastrous consequences for living arrangements and some interesting experiences for Gracie as the pandemic takes hold in Australia and you have what was billed as “a wildly inventive and savagely funny novel about love and mortality”.
To some degree this is what I experienced. There were certainly some amusing parts and the administrative organisation of the afterlife was reminiscent of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida which made for some wryly funny situations. But the novel did start losing me towards the end as the situations become ridiculous and kind of shocking actually. Gracie is really full on and I didn’t find her as quirkily endearing as I think she was supposed to be. There are ghosts, there are philosophical musings about where we go when we die and faith in general but honestly I just don’t know what the point of it all was?
So not a total win for me.