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Featured Author

A Fraction of the Whole

This month our Featured Author, Steve Toltz, answers questions from The BS Book group from Bristol.

Q: Your book is quite long and must have been difficult to sustain. How did you plan the structure or was it all inside your head?

A: Even though it took me five years to write, it wasn’t that difficult to sustain because the key to persistence (people don’t often tell you this) is to have a poor perception of time –– the fact is that every day for five years I was certain I only had three to six months left to write, and that kept me going. The structure came together naturally; rather than as a result of extensive planning, it was a result of excessively thinking about a single story for a long time. For me, writing is a process of evolution. The characters begin as single-celled organisms who mutate pleasantly over a period of years.

Q: Please can you tell us what your next work is?

A: There is very little I can tell you about the second book other than that I am almost half-way through it. Authors seem to be stuck with their processes, and I can see this second novel already evolving and sprouting unexpected limbs. There would be no point describing it as is because in all likelihood by the time I finish, it will have mutated into another creature entirely.

Q: P.341, Emerson’s quote on fractions: How big a fraction are you?

A: People in interviews have been asking me—how did I come up with the title? Where did the book come from? What was my inspiration? And so forth. The truth is, I have no idea. In fact, whenever I hear anyone explaining the process of creation lucidly and articulately, I’m frankly suspicious. I don’t believe anybody has any idea how to really describe a complicated and incommunicable mental process. This is why we attribute a falling apple to Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation: clearly a made-up answer. This above paragraph is, of course, a way of not answering your question.

Q: Which writers do you admire, and did you have any in mind when you wrote this novel?

A: There are many, many authors I admire – Cheever, Bellow, Mencken, Cioran, Roth (Phillip and Joseph), Carver, Murakami, Bolano, Milosz, Nabokov ...just to mention a few. While writing Fraction, I had in mind Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferninand Celine, Michael Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Miller, John Fante, Fernando Pessoa, Thomas Bernhard, Raymond Chandler and Jorge Louis Borges.

Q: How much of the novel has been drawn upon your own experience?

A: All of it, although fortunately, the book is not autobiographical, and thus it is not in any way a portrait of my childhood or of my own father. It was not even my original intention to say anything about parent/child relationships, although during the writing of the book, Martin’s central dilemma in raising his son became interesting to me: how to teach another human being to be his own person. And do you try and pass the characteristics about yourself that you are most proud of, even though you know they have made you miserable? What if you think very poorly of the education system available but you don’t have the time or energy to teach the child yourself? What if you don’t want your child to follow the herd, but you know that to stand out is a recipe for misery? Martin is plagued by questions that have no clear answer. So am I.