Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz review - When life after death comes up short

The afterlife isn't as freeing as Angus Moody might've thought it would be - had he believed in an afterlife. For a start, the dead still have to earn a living, which doesn't seem quite right. But then not everything in Here Goes Nothing, Steve Toltz's third novel, does seem quite right.

Not long after passing through the celestial gates to a place "populated by people who used to laugh more", the narrator finds himself seated before an officious, small-mouthed bureaucrat at the Central Employment Agency. The humourless chap demands to know Moody's entire work and educational history, something that irks our recently deceased protagonist.

As a one-time petty criminal whose most recent gig involved filming weddings his wife Gracie officiated, Moody didn't arrive in the afterlife with a glowing CV.

Boasting no "transferable skills", Moody is dispatched to the local umbrella factory while the reader is transported to Sydney sometime in the not-too-distant future. It's all pretty bleak. A lethal pandemic is edging closer to our shores and a terminally ill interloper named Owen is making a move on Gracie.

Through chapters that alternate between a dystopian afterlife and a largely unappealing near-future, Toltz tackles an enduring human trait. As if being dead, constipated and destined to assembling umbrellas for eternity weren't bad enough, Moody discovers he still gives a shit about what people think. He and every other dead person.

At a meeting of a post-traumatic death disorder support group, Moody looks on as his fellow dead try and one-up each other with the grizzly details of their untimely deaths. The competition is intense, the pervading air of self-importance embarrassing.

"We were superstars only in our own orbits, categorically boring, merely average," Moody concludes.

It's one of several insights that run the gamut from "funny" to "oh yeah" without ever quite reaching the "I wish I'd thought of that" end of the spectrum. Toltz tackles spirituality ("a gussied up form of self-obsession"), marriage ("like I had suddenly moved over to the leisure class") and fear ("running for your life restores you to factory settings"), among countless other things.

The majority of these observations ring true, but every so often I found myself questioning Moody's capacity for reliable narration ("The shaman and his clairvoyant wife gave off the vibe of having met on Craigslist that very morning"). The transplanting of early 2000s American hookup culture to a houseboat on the Hawkesbury River struck me as an odd authorial choice, but not a fatal one.

In the end, Here Goes Nothing is a dark, often amusing reminder that whatever we might tell ourselves, we all want to be liked.