On sunny days at Coogee Beach, in Sydney’s east, you’ll find the usual suspects: swimmers, joggers, and people with a devoted relationship with giant water bottles. And then there’s Steve Toltz, 54, pen and notebook in hand, using a municipal-blue picnic table as a splinter desk. One of the most serious funny writers in Australian fiction, doing what he does best: making despair feel oddly like a good time.
This is where I meet him. He spends a few hours here most days writing, including his new novel The Rise of the Lanterns. He looks exactly how you’d expect a dark fiction writer to look: wild writer’s hair flopped around, a classic graphic tee, and a slightly sarcastic expression. Taken together, it gives the impression that he would be a nice guest you could expect to sit next to at a dinner party.
That’s even if he seems, at least at first, a little nervous, a little nervous – maybe shy – about being interviewed. Like a scene from his own novel, our conversation is cut short by a man on a nearby bench making a strange, unrecognizable sound.
“That’s probably the luckiest thing that’s happened to me in my life is that I enjoy probably 98 percent of the process,” he says of writing a novel. “I enjoy dreaming it up, imagining how the ideas I have can become a book. I enjoy writing my first rough drafts. I enjoy the process of editing and rewriting them, so something bad becomes good and then it can be published.
“I enjoy the whole process. When I present it to the editor and then work with the editorial team, and they give me tips. I enjoy the process of correcting mistakes and improving them. I enjoyed everything until … like yesterday.”
Pause, while I get up to the joke. Oh, he means until this interview, about his fourth novel. His first, A Part of Everythingit was something of a literary event in 2008 – a sprawling, chaotic father-son story that took almost a decade to write and arrived with a bang: great development, critical characterization, and a great place. shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.
The son of two lawyers who lived on Sydney’s northern shores, educated at Knox Grammar School and Killara High School, he studied video production at Newcastle University before drifting, geographically and academically, through Vancouver, New York, Barcelona and Paris. He has one of the best writing resumes you’ll ever come across: private detective, bodyguard, telemarketer, screenwriter, teacher – as well as occasional work in film. Let’s stay there.
Toltz was an extra in George Lucas’ 2002 film Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Or at least, he’s sure he was. Is he recognizable? “If you could recognize my gait,” he says. He plays a stormtrooper, appearing briefly in a walking scene. Perhaps lucky to see him as a background actor in an episode of an Australian TV series Water Rats? “I feel like I had to pretend to snort a line of cocaine at a party.” And then there’s David Cronenberg’s 1996 classic To fall: “My job was to get there at five in the morning, put out orange cones, and make sure no one was parking there, then when the film trucks came, I left. So, I didn’t see any films.”
In 2004, while living in Paris, he suffered a cervical spinal cord hemorrhage that left him temporarily paralyzed; the doctors were not sure that he would walk again. He did it, and the experience abounds in his work. After many years living in Los Angeles – working as a screenwriter No Activity and Guilty Party – returned to Sydney in 2023, and now lives within walking distance of this park bench with her 14-year-old son.
Like General Section was his loud introduction, the novels that followed intensified the constant excitement about human identity. And Light sand (2015) and Here To Go Nowhere (2022), Toltz continued to revolve around questions of death, meaning and free will, creating what he has described as a “trilogy of fear”, exploring the fear of death, suffering, and the opinions of others.
It is a type of writing that invites its own adjective, Toltzian: hyperactive prose; downward philosophy; fast-paced dialogue, and smart, slightly judgmental characters who can’t stop talking themselves into (and out of) trouble. His work shares DNA with the likes of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Carey and Knut Hamsun.
His latest novel opens with one of the strongest first lines of the year: “It was the year my mother reported suspicious behavior in the backyard: my father, as she knew.” The story is told from the perspective of Russell Wilson, a former child psychologist whose work screening potential recruits at the NSW Department of Health has been largely taken over by AI, leaving him, as the character points out, “a human resource robot assistant”. To make matters worse, his wife is having an affair with an Uber driver named Jed, and his parents announce they no longer want to see him.
Rusty goes through all of this with a kind of mental fog: no ambition, high self-awareness, and a restless question of what is within his control, and what is a question of fate. “Have you purposely cultivated a bad person out of boredom?” his boss asks, a question that lands somewhere between insult and understanding. Toltz is interested in these figures: what we might call lovable losers, but who perhaps make more sense than the text they strive to follow.
“I think in a way they are like selfish people. I like characters who have the ability to question themselves because I enjoy putting thoughts in their heads and writing characters who are constantly questioning themselves and can express their own weaknesses. And yes, I have enough to draw,” he says.
Nobody has any answers and that’s the best place to write a story from, from a secret place.
Toltz turns his attention inward The Rise of the Lanterns to the impossibility of consciousness: the limits of personal knowledge, the gap between internal narratives and external reality, as well as the uneasy dynamics between alienation and connection.
“It’s an unanswered part of science. Science doesn’t understand consciousness, or what it is. We don’t really understand the mind. But there are a lot of interesting theories. You have panpsychism and all these different theories of consciousness and now that AI is in the world, I feel like it’s a really good place to come from a good place to write and there’s no good place to write. secrets,” he says.
Head The Rise of the Lanterns it works on several levels. It is an old word for the death of the lungs – one of the most unfortunate poetic expressions of the 19th century – but also a sign towards the slow dawn of self-awareness, the light that dispels the fog. And, Toltz adds, when philosophers and neuroscientists debate whether a machine can be conscious, the shorthand question is always the same: are the lights on? “AI is self-correcting; very few people are. That’s where we fail,” Rusty reflects.
Toltz has experimented with Chatbots, but is wary of where things are headed. He envisions a future like that imagined in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, not outright oppression, but a life controlled by total dependence on technology.
“Another force that I think really controls us is our own desire for convenience. We’re such lazy —ers that when something is fast, easy, frictionless, we’ll just take it, and we’ll never go back,” he says. “We’re not good at doing cost-benefit analysis. We vaguely understand the costs, but we know the benefits. We’re in real danger of being, I think, oppressively dependent. It’s not a shoe, it’s not a smile, it’s like a helping hand that will just help us do things until we can no longer do them ourselves.”
For all that, the book did not begin seriously. It started with a joke that stuck. Rusty’s wife has an affair with an Uber driver, who later describes the relationship with unexpected poetry: “He was in the back, and we just met through the rearview mirror. I guess you could say it was a backseat/frontseat romance.”
Toltz collects these pieces – jokes, situations, odd bits of dialogue – and holds them until they fall into place. Some thoughts in The Rise of the Lanternshe says, they have been there for decades. His process remains a stubborn analog: writing everything by hand in a notebook, then writing it down sooner rather than later. This was a habit reinforced after losing a notebook on a flight and, with it, a month’s work. Pen and paper is how he started writing, he says, and so he has continued. It also keeps him free from distractions.
If his earlier novels are of the highest order – expansive and twisty – this is more contained, unfolding over the course of a year, from New Year’s Eve to the next. He also wrote more quickly than his previous books.
“I think I just don’t want to take seven years to write a book. You know, I’m 50 years old now, and there’s a limit. I have 20 books in my mind that I’d like to write, and I’m not 20 years old. I don’t have a lifetime worth of 20 books in front of me, so it’s a race against the clock now,” he says.
Toltz has already started the next one. Plans for a trilogy about consciousness have loosened, but the same interests hold. The routine does too, including returning many days to the benches near the beach.
“Whenever life takes me away from being able to work on a novel, I’m a little unhappy,” Toltz says. “If something feels wrong, so I always like to write, and I can’t imagine a day when I wouldn’t be.”
The Rise of the Lanterns it’s out now. Steve Toltz appears Sydney Writers Festival (May 17-24).
