Book review: Quicksand by Steve Toltz is too long and too full of itself

First impressions are not easy to shake. It's true of Aldo Benjamin - the all but intolerable protagonist of Steve Toltz's high-caffeine second novel, a grizzled ex-con in a wheelchair who talks as if he has swallowed a particularly observant writer's daybook of cleverisms.

His long-suffering friend, Liam, a cop with literary aspirations (surely the worst kind), calls him an "amateur psychoanalyst", but as smart-arses go, Aldo goes further.

Every growling utterance is a glinting aperçu, sardonic theorem or pithy barb - here a philosophy turned on its head, there a Delphic epiphany or passage of advanced technobabble. What on earth are we to make of "withering emoticons of heteroflexible tweens"?

But then Liam - Aldo's unwanted amanuensis and our narrator throughout this deafening Niagara of a book - is almost as bad. "Despite your singular fate, to write about you is to troubleshoot the human spirit," he pronounces. Oh, dear. Together (in a scuzzy Aussie beachside bar) they make an unlikely double act, and as early as page four I found myself looking at the following 400 with misgivings.

But Toltz, whose widely praised debut, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the 2008 Booker prize, probably didn't get where he is today by worrying about dialogue that sounds like a deranged brainiac reading it aloud through a megaphone. And when I wasn't shouting at the book to just shut up, I was laughing my fool head off.