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"  Here&amp;#039;s my problem: Pretty much every time I get to the last 50 pages of a long novel, I wonder, What the hell did I read this for? All that time. All the lost hours. You can almost feel veins pulsing in the writer&amp;#039;s temples. Yet for some reason, I take a look at the first page anyhow, because somewhere inside I am convinced that long books must still matter. Maybe this one will be worth it, I hope -- then I go in, falling to my knees, belly down under the pages.  Well, A Fraction of the Whole (Spiegel &amp;amp;amp; Grau, $25), by Australian Steve Toltz, is that rarest of long books -- utterly worth it -- which is why you&amp;#039;ll have to bear with me on portents of this next line: This book is witty and intellectual, a physical comedy and literary rant all at once. The year is two months old. But this is the book of a two-month-old year. It may well carry the whole thing. The story starts in a prison riot and ends on a plane, and there is not one forgettable episode in between, as a son tells the pop-pop-pop story of his criminally, lovingly insane father and their bizarre adventures flopping forward toward death, toward prison, toward Paris, and back; it reads like Mark Twain with access to an intercontinental Airbus. It&amp;#039;s an episodic story, kite-strung with mind fucks. This book moves; it bucks and rocks in a world that feels more than a hemisphere away, a world where the crispy black shadow of 9/11 does not inform every word from the mouths of geniuses and the evolution of one man, let alone a planet. All 544 pages are so comically dark and inviting that you have no choice but to step forward into its icy wake. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a4084/fraction-of-whole-0208/>