Daddy dearest

First novels come in various shapes and sizes. There's the modest little first novel that wisely sticks to what the writer knows, while others feel straight-faced, strait-laced and taut -- finely crafted but too much the product of the MFA program and the workshop. Reckless ones shoot for the moon, and many such fail and remain moldering in a bottom drawer, or else, like John Fowles' "The Magus," they end up being published only after the writer has burst through the gates with a more obviously commercial effort.

Then, occasionally, a big, sprawling first novel fights its way into print with a flourish, at which point its ambition and the eccentricities of its "firstness" can become its best marketing tools. Such is the case with Australian writer Steve Toltz's "A Fraction of the Whole," a book that is willfully misanthropic and very funny, a meditation on the inescapable legacies that fathers bequeath their sons and the overall toxicity of family. In "A Fraction of the Whole," it's not only Mum and Dad who screw you up; siblings get in on it too.

The novel's primary narrator is young Jasper Dean, who sets out to tell the story of his father, Martin, and his uncle Terry. As in much comedy, exaggeration is a frequently and effectively employed tool here. "Most of my life I never worked out whether or not to pity, love, hate, ignore, adore, judge or murder my father," writes Jasper, laying out a palette of Oedipal possibilities broad enough to satisfy any budding Hamlet. But, having invoked his theme, Toltz has the daring to take us on a long detour, introducing father Martin's version of the Dean family chronicles, beginning with how he slips into a coma shortly before his half brother Terry's birth. When Martin finally wakes up, he remains sickly but remembers every single word of the many books his mother read to him while he was asleep. He's insufferably smart, ugly and filled with an acute self-loathing. Terry, on the other hand, is handsome and outgoing, a brilliant young athlete possessed of an unassuming and effortless charm.

Terry's life changes when his leg is wrecked in a knife fight and he can't play the sports at which he excels. His energy, flipped into rage, pours instead into a life of crime. He turns to robbing banks and achieves national celebrity after taking very public, violent revenge on members of the Australian cricket team who've been accepting bribes. Terry becomes a folk hero, a latter-day Ned Kelly. Along the way, he and Martin fall for the same girl, the lovely Caroline Potts. "I wanted her for myself. I wanted my brother's happiness. I wanted him safe. I wanted him free of crime and danger. But most of all I wanted her for myself," says Martin, in a pickle as usual.