Australian novelist on fourth book A Rising of the Lights

On sun-bleached days at Coogee Beach in Sydney’s east, you’ll find the usual suspects: swimmers, runners and people in serious relationships with large water bottles. And then there’s Steve Toltz, 54, pen and notebook in hand, using a municipal blue picnic table as a splintering table. One of Australian literature’s funniest, most earnest writers does what he does best: making existential despair feel like a strangely good time.

This is where I met him. He spends most days writing for several hours there, including on his new novel Rising of Lights. He looks exactly what you’d expect from a noir comic writer: slightly crazy writer hair sticking out in all directions, a casual graphic tee, and a slightly sarcastic expression. Taken together, he gives the impression that he’s a well-valued guest you’d hope to sit next to at a dinner party.

This is even if, at least at first, he seems a little awkward, a little confused – perhaps shy – about being interviewed. Like a scene from his own novel, our conversation is briefly interrupted by a magnificent, unignorable belch from a man sitting on a nearby bench.

“Probably the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life is that I enjoy 98 percent of the process,” he says of writing a novel. “I like to dream, to imagine how the ideas that come to my mind might become a book. I like to write my first bad drafts. I enjoy the process of editing and rewriting them, so something bad becomes pretty good and then it becomes publishable.”

“I enjoy the whole process. When I pitch it to an editor and then I work with a team of editors and they give me some notes. I enjoy the process of fixing mistakes and making improvements. I enjoyed everything until yesterday.”

A pause while I catch the joke. Ah, he means until then This Interview about his fourth novel. His first A. Fraction of the Wholeit was something literary event In 2008 – a sprawling, chaotic father-son story that took almost a decade to write and came out with a bang: significant progress, critical acclaim, and a place in the rankings Man Booker Prize shortlist and the Guardian First Book Award.

The son of two lawyers living on Sydney’s north shore, educated at Knox Grammar School and Killara High School, he studied video production at Newcastle University before moving geographically and professionally to Vancouver, New York, Barcelona and Paris. He has one of the best writer resumes you’ll ever come across: private investigator, security guard, telemarketer, screenwriter, teacher — plus he works intermittently in movies. Let’s linger there.

Toltz was an extra in George Lucas’s 2002 film. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Or at least he’s pretty sure it was him. Is it recognisable? “If you could describe my walk,” he says. He plays a stormtrooper who appears briefly in a marching scene. Maybe seeing him as a background actor in an episode of an Australian TV series will provide better luck water mouseQ? “I feel like I have to pretend to snort cocaine at a party.” And then there’s David Cronenberg’s 1996 classic Accident: “My job was to get there at five in the morning, hand out orange cones and make sure no one parked there, then I left when the movie trucks arrived. So I didn’t see any of the production.”

In 2004, while living in Paris, he suffered a spontaneous cervical spinal hemorrhage that left him temporarily paralyzed; doctors weren’t sure if he would walk again. He did this, and this experience contributed to his business. After living in Los Angeles for many years, he worked as a screenwriter. No Event And Guilty Party – He returned to Sydney in 2023 and now lives within walking distance of this park bench with his 14-year-old son.

If Part of the Whole Because it was a rather tumultuous introduction, the novels that followed deepened a series of recurring obsessions with human identity. With Swamp (2015) and Here Nothing Goes (2022), Toltz continued to circle questions of mortality, meaning, and free will; In his own words, he created a “horror trilogy”; explored the fear of death, suffering, and the opinions of others.

This is the kind of writing that invites its own epithet, Toltz: hyperactive prose; extraneous philosophy; snappy dialogue and smart, somewhat doomed characters who can’t stop themselves from getting into (and getting out of) trouble. His work shares the same DNA with the likes of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Carey and Knut Hamsun.

His latest novel begins with one of the sharpest first lines of the year: “It was the year my mother reported a suspicious person in the backyard: my father, as she well knew.” The story is told from the perspective of Russell Wilson, a former child psychotherapist whose job vetting potential recruits for the NSW Department of Health has been largely taken over by artificial intelligence, leaving him to be “a robot’s assistant in human resources”, as the character puts it. To make matters worse, his wife is having an affair with an Uber driver named Jed, and his parents declare that they no longer want to see him.

Rusty goes through all this in a kind of mental haze: no ambition, heightened self-awareness, and an uneasy question about what is under his control and what is a matter of fate. “Did you deliberately develop an objectionable personality out of boredom?” his boss asks a question that falls somewhere between insult and insight. Toltz is attracted to these figures: people who we might call lovable losers, but who perhaps make more sense than the scripts they have trouble following.

“I think they’re like other egos in some ways. I like characters who are capable of self-questioning because I enjoy putting thoughts into their heads and writing characters who are constantly questioning themselves and being able to call out their own weaknesses. And yes, there’s enough that I can draw on,” he says.

No one has the answer, and this is the best place to write fiction from a place of mystery.

Toltz turns his attention to: Rising of Lights to the elusive issue of consciousness: the limits of self-knowledge, the gap between internal narrative and external reality, as well as the uneasy dynamic between isolation and connection.

“It’s an unanswered part of science. Science doesn’t really understand consciousness or what it is. We don’t even really understand intelligence. But there are a lot of fun theories. There’s panpsychism and all these different theories of consciousness, and now that artificial intelligence is in the world, I feel like that’s a very rich place to explore. Nobody has any answers, and that’s the best place to write fiction from a place of mystery,” he says.

Title Rising of Lights It works at various levels. It’s an old term for lung death – one of the incidental poetic expressions of the 19th century – but it also points to the gradual birth of self-awareness, the light with which the fog clears. Toltz adds that when philosophers and neuroscientists debate whether a machine can be conscious, the short question is always the same: Are the lights on? “AI is self-correcting; very few people are. That’s where we let ourselves down,” Rusty thinks.

Toltz has experimented with Chatbots but is cautious about where things will go. He contemplates a future similar to the one imagined in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, lives controlled not by overt oppression but by complete dependence on technology.

“The other force that I think really controls us is our appetite for convenience. We’re so lazy that as soon as something becomes faster, easier, more frictionless, we take it on and never, ever look back,” he says. “We’re not good at doing cost-benefit analysis. We vaguely understand the cost, but we’re very aware of the benefit. I think we run the risk of turning into a compulsion from this addiction. It’s not a boot, it’s not a smile, it’s like a helping hand to help us do things until we can’t do them ourselves anymore.”

Despite all this, the book did not start out in earnest. It started with a joke that stuck. Rusty’s wife is having an affair with an Uber driver, and he later describes the affair with unexpected poetry: “He was in the back and we just made sustained eye contact through the rearview mirror. I guess you could say it was a backseat/front seat romance.”

Toltz collects these pieces—jokes, situations, odd bits of dialogue—and holds them until he finds a place. some ideas Rising of LightsHe says he’s been stalling for decades. His process remains stubbornly analog: He writes everything by hand in notebooks and transcribes it sooner rather than later. It was a habit that was reinforced after he lost his notebook and a month’s work with it on a plane trip. He says he started writing with pen and paper and just kept going. It also ensures that there is no distraction.

While his previous novels have been truly maximalist, sweeping and digressive, this one is more involving and unfolds over the course of a single year, from one New Year’s Eve to the next. He also wrote faster than his previous books.

“I think I don’t want to spend seven years writing a book. You know, I’m in my 50s now and there is a limit. I have 20 books in my mind that I would love to write, but I don’t have 20 years. I don’t have 20 books ahead of me, so this is now a race against time,” he says.

Toltz has already started the next one. Plans for a consciousness-related trilogy have been loosened, but the same underlying interests remain. So is the routine, which includes heading back to the beachside benches most days.

“Whenever life robs me of the ability to work on a novel, I always feel a little unhappy,” Toltz says. “It’s like something is wrong, that’s why I love writing all the time and I can’t imagine a day when I won’t write.”

Rising of Lights is out now. Steve Toltz appears on: Sydney Writers Festival (May 17-24).