Sentience is a life sentence, my child. Welcome to the party.
With caustic wit and razor-sharp dialogue, Here Goes Nothing is a novel that leaves a stinging mark. Set in a near future where yet another zoonotic virus just might be the big one, Angus Mooney has never believed in God or the supernatural, but when he suddenly dies and finds himself in a Kafkaesque afterlife — filling up with more pandemic victims than its wonky bureaucracy and crumbling society can support — Mooney’s experiences, memories, and ironic commentary on life and its aftermath make for biting (and often very funny) observations on modern life. Author Steve Toltz balances the snark by creating characters that I loved (with at least one that I loved to hate) and he has written here my favourite kind of novel: it captured truth, it made me think, it made me feel, and I couldn’t ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
What happened next is difficult to put into words. Think of a sea mist that’s entirely black. Now picture that black mist blooming inside you. Now consider how it would feel to change places with a shadow. Then visualise your heart circling a drain. Now imagine you’re a plant at the moment it’s pulled up by the roots. Following that, envision being a dawn in reverse and your lungs being erased atom by atom while your head is lowered into a pit of mud. Now conjure up an immense all-consuming silence. It is difficult to put into words, but you can see where this was going, and where it went.
Reader, I was dead.
Mooney is a loveable loser: After a childhood in foster care and an adult life supporting himself with petty crime, he had the great luck of meeting and falling in love with Gracie — a beautiful pint-sized wedding officiant whose ceremonies are stuffed with bizarre-but-true observations on modern life — and after somehow getting her to love him in return, they married and Mooney took up a straight life as her videographer. Gracie definitely does believe in the supernatural (without committing to any one belief system) and her no-nonsense wise-cracking has built her an impressive social media presence. When a sick old man shows up at their house, the house he grew up in, and offers them a large inheritance to let him die there, the lure of the money comes at just the right time as the couple is bankrupting themselves with IVF treatments. But when Mooney dies and finds a way to check back in on his widow, he realises that nothing on Earth might be as it had seemed.
I don’t want to say any more about the plot, but here’s an example of the type of humour:
At St Michael’s, the bishop stood at the pulpit beneath an ostentatious cross, carrying on melodramatically like he was a character in an Agatha Christie novel. It’s always the same with these guys. They never let you forget that Jesus is dead, that it was foul play, and that you’re the main suspect.
And this is not a COVID novel (the Good Boy virus is much, much worse) but being set slightly in the future gives Toltz several opportunities to comment on our current situation:
• The last pandemic had been bad enough; all that gruelling isolation and silly panic buying and overeating — the Fattening, they’d called it.
• The only good thing about the last pandemic had been the post-vaccine orgies and when those activists set fire to all the cruise ships.
In addition to the big questions about life and death and the hereafter, Toltz is able to make commentary on internet culture, suburbanisation, and consumerism. Here is one of Gracie’s rants:
End times are tough all over, right? The question is, how did we not see where this volatile and unhappy interplay of negative amplifiers was heading? Overpopulation, ecocide, unchecked capitalism — check! Unheeded warnings, perpetual growth, unstoppable consumerism — check! What I’m trying to say is, a triumph of the human spirit was bad for the environment. We objectified nature. Our backfires spread like wildfires. We were custodians of the earth and we physically abused our charge. Fishing the seas to extinction was as self-defeating as giving yourself a neck tattoo on the way to a job interview.
Here Goes Nothing is certainly a book of ideas — what better way to comment on the human condition than from the other side of death? — but at its core it’s about the relationship between Mooney and Gracie. And as engaging and entertaining as I found their Earth-bound interplay to have been, the dawning inevitability of what comes after was truly heart-in-throat for me: I grew to care about these characters and Toltz gave them a credible and satisfying arc. I loved it all.
