In his fourth novel, Steve Toltz – best known for the Booker prize-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole – takes on the story of one man’s loneliness to deliver a satirical and surprisingly moving ode to human connection. Much like his earlier works, this one is filled with con men, tall tales and black humour, making for a bitingly funny exploration of life’s misfortunes.
A Rising of the Lights opens with an absurd premise: two ne’er-do-well parents, in the middle of their divorce, roll dice to split up their twin children; one child will go with each parent. After winning him in this cruel game, Russell “Rusty” Wilson’s mother tells him they’ll be moving to Melbourne from Sydney – only to deem it “too much hassle”, circle the block and bring him right back to where they started. It’s an arresting opener that foreshadows the following 300 pages of Rusty’s life.
Flash forward a few decades and things have not improved for Rusty. A former child therapist turned human resources officer, he is now “51 years of age, 5 feet 7, 87 Kilos”; according to everyone he knows, he’s gotten fat. At work, he puts on a “purposefully cultivated objectionable persona” to liven up his otherwise miserable days. It’s unsurprising when he loses his job, which, in any case, was already being done by AI. To make things worse, his wife has just cheated on him, and his only deep connection is with his weird neighbour Dennis.
After he’s laid off, he spends his days intentionally trying to make other people’s lives worse, reciting his mantra: “Do your best, you cunt. Reach for the skies, you grub.” So far, his life seems to have amounted to little.
Rusty experiences a particularly male-coded loneliness. He feels rejected by everyone in his life; his now ex-wife, his awful parents, and even his eccentric long-lost twin sister, with whom he’s newly reunited. Dennis observes that he and Rusty are both people whose “lives have simplified to a suicidal level of loneliness, but maybe that’s the exit strategy we wanted”.
But Rusty’s isolation is not purely circumstantial; it is reinforced by his deep bitterness towards anyone who appears remotely happy. Of course, he doesn’t see it as his fault. “Being male has fallen into disrepute … but what can you do?” he tells a teenage boy. He blames the loss of his job on his ex-wife – “her destructive behaviour and my emotional upheaval” – rather than on his own attitude. In more ways than one, he’s being left behind. “These days, you have to be careful whom you broadcast your ideas to,” he says, in response to an accusation of workplace racism.
But just as he is hitting rock bottom, Rusty’s stars change when he is offered a job as a guidance councillor at a Sydney private school. He’s terrible at the work, trying desperately to understand the children around him while inflicting his own trauma on them. “If the students did not leave my office shaking to their very core, I had not done my job,” he reflects. But it is this job that opens him up to new versions of community and connection that will change his life.
A Rising of the Lights is clearly a satirical take on the so-called male loneliness epidemic, and it is often darkly funny. But Rusty’s misogyny falls flat, and isn’t resolved enough to offer greater meaning. In a world where everyone is awful, I found it difficult to know where to place my empathy.
Toltz’s prose is lively and dynamic, full of strikingly original turns of phrase and metaphors that mostly land. As Rusty experiences the disillusionment of adulthood and a rapidly shrinking sense of purpose, the world through his eyes becomes a bizarre (and probably unfairly rigged) game of chance, complete with absurd scenes and unlikely characters. Rusty’s frenzied and performatively witty narration ostensibly belongs to a middle-aged man, but often carries the tone of a teenage boy who thinks he’s the brightest in the room.
Of course, that’s exactly the point. In many ways, Rusty remains the child whose life was decided by a toss of the dice. He’s attempting to make sense of the formative rupture of his early years. He’s seeking redemption. And, most of all, he’s grasping wildly for a way to move beyond that lonely, unloved version of himself. The question is, will he be able to?
For fans of Toltz, A Rising of the Lights will likely feel consistent with his earlier works. Despite moments of brilliance in Toltz’s writing, I was unenamoured with Rusty’s miserable persona for much of the book. His malicious jokes and bitterness veer to the wrong side of pitiable. But the book does eventually come full circle, and the conclusion delivers a payoff that is well worth sticking around for.
-
A Rising of the Lights by Steve Toltz is out now in Australia (Penguin, $34.99)