In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve.–Franz KafkaIn his first (published) novel, I am convinced that Tom McCarthy realized his beguilingly strange fictive vision within a degree of perfection. In a skillfully wrought authorial mirroring, every element begets that which renders it contingent—the everyman narrative voice, the unadorned prose, the detached inflection and intonation, the hum of the banal and drone of the workaday, the subdued sexuality, the repetitive nature and clerkish attention to detail, the threadbare characterization, unexplored potentialities, the tangential asides upon minutiae, the rational explorations of the irrational—each and all are of a structure that is necessitated by its component parts whilst simultaneously constraining those parts to fit its formative strictures. Thus, it is the case that, in my opinion, the properties of the novel which have produced an array of negative critiques would be difficult to address without substantively diminishing the level of perfection they have attained towards the full expression of the authorial vision; that those readerly complaints, while reasonably conceived and justifiably construed, would likely prove unanswerable without Remainder becoming something entirely different at its very core—for this is a Möbius strip of a novel, enacting the internal and external theaters of existence without ever traversing the environ of the one for the other. McCarthy is herein operating at the margins espied by all whose have experienced the transcendent shivers of a cognition in sensual embrace with the material world, the pneuma made aware that its sundering from original unity is neither eternal nor punitive, but of a harmonious cosmic mystery. The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.–Simone WeilAnd a mystery Remainder, well, remains—one all the more remarkable in that its fictional essence works on several different levels with seemingly equal plausibility and aplomb. It begs to be reread, that one might either polish the sheen of previous perception, or perhaps opt to explore the possibilities of a differing avenue of interpretation altogether. While it did not blow me away, leave me astounded by the prose or the concept, it still left me highly impressed with how McCarthy so masterfully achieved the effects that he seemed to have set out to achieve. It's a remarkable achievement: in the annals of literature, it stands unique—a strange but precise unveiling of one man's obsession.The nameless narrator, a stand-in for the modern English everyman who is whittling away his days within the nebulous-but-ubiquitous commercial environs of market research, having been incapacitated in hospital for several months after something struck him at the terminal point of free-fall, receives an eight-and-a-half million pound settlement from the undisclosed corporation held responsible, thanks, in no small part, to the persistent wiles of his solicitor. At a loss for what to do with this windfall, and suffering a perduring sensation of incompleteness, of inauthenticity, since awakening from his coma, a chance encounter at an acquaintance's housewarming party invokes a potent and paralyzing inner vision: of a previous physical environment, within a tenement block, in which a sequence of active and inactive interactions between the narrator and a select portion of his neighbours are recalled as having been complete and purifying in their orderly, natural flow. Though it cannot be determined, with any precision, whether the vision was deja-vu or jamais-vu, it imprints itself with overwhelming and mnemonically replete force within the narrator's mind, and provides him with an end for his newly acquired financial means: the reconstruction, down the most minute of details, of this tenement, complete with live-in actors to portray the neighbours, and in operation twenty-four/seven based upon the whims of the head conductor. Immensely satisfied with the transcendent results he obtains from these re-enactions, the narrator opts to explore the potentiality within further recreations based upon happenstance that transpires within his new life: that of the repair of a flattened tire and the subsequent flooding of a faulty windshield wiper fluid container; the drive-by execution of a black gang member on the streets of Brixton; and a re-enactment of the re-enactment. As with any addiction, that of the narrator's drive to satisfy his compulsion for precisely contextual unfolding seeks an outlet in ever more complex and variegated dosages, until, in a conceptual masterstroke, he conceives the potential for merging recreation with creation, a blending of actual and fantasy that brings his entire operation unto the precipice.There are different ways the novel's events can be understood: an ironic look at how the whims of the wealthy are designed to be catered to in our modern societies, the respect accorded their power to buy people, even as beings whose actions are scripted to the utmost detail, and the questionable morality underwriting a power with such subtle immanency for abuse. A satire upon our burgeoning need to feel a connexion with the world, to establish our identities in ways that soothe the alienation imposed by our democratic capitalist system, by means of turning that alienation on its head by observing history and then reworking it until all of the kinks have been ironed out. Yet I believe that McCarthy is aiming for higher ground herein: there is an appreciable level of respect held towards the narrator for the fact that he is sparing no object—effort, time, money—in order to realize a private vision that the others, though obtaining none of the same shivery but serene metaphysical bliss from the results, still manage to attain a considerable satisfaction from, whatever their connexion to a particular facet of the re-enactment; this applies especially to Naz, the logistics wunderkind whose organizational prowess proves instrumental in bringing these complex visions to fruition. There is a taste of the pleasures of the Demiurge mingled with that of his creations; it is worth noting that, throughout the span of the re-enactment projects, not a single employee—behind the scenes or live in the unfolding—quits from frustration, boredom, or anxiety. The narrator, while succoring his own soul, appears to be providing a measure of that solace to the spirits of his vastly expanding crew. By reducing the pace of the recollected flow, temporal progress is brought almost to the condition of canvases parading past—regular modern existence endowed with the sublime and moving characteristics of a painting from a past master; the sterility of a practical and bustling twentieth-century enhanced with the revelational potential of colour-wrought universal expression.Is it better to use one's money to bring about an artistic endeavor, rather than simply finagling another way to snag a buck from the consumer? Particularly when there is no intent to recoup any of the production costs through the enactment itself? The narrator is convinced. Self-aware, believing himself clumsy and plastic in this unreal world, it is through the slowing down of scripted, anticipated routines that he manages to bring time to a standstill, merging the past, present, and future into a melange of unity; to go from being outside, forlorn and alone, to within the very core of existence, authentic, enlivened, not observing the world be but an integral component of how that being, constrained by the ticking of the clock, can take control of the process, ensuring a flow of life that sets the nerve-ends on fire with its spatial integrality, its enveloping cohesion. Seeing through one's eyes or the eyes of others brings people's lives—otherwise rushed, fleeting, absorbed in the moment—into coherence, provides the room for and establishes the importance of pausing to drink in the amassed richness of one's immediate environment, take an exquisite pleasure from the otherwise banal details of how one is positioned, what materials one is amidst, how the light can be captured in an endless variety of angled reflections and refraction. In the sensory perceptions of an ordered recreation, the otherwise depletable banks of memory are augmented, strengthened, filled to the brim and warded against the decays of aged egress. And yet, the narrator increasingly becomes aware that the introduction of random events into an established procedure, the interplay of chance with preordained regimen, heightens the glow engendered through the re-enactive process; that any element of life is inherent with the possibility of stochastic imposition upon the structuring of things, and that this element constitutes a vital part of lived experience. Hell, contra Einstein, perhaps God enjoys the roll of the dice.It's all very strange, but wonderful; precise and cantered, but flowing and propulsive. I loved it. There are intimations throughout that things are not quite what they seem: is the narrator still in a coma, his dormant mind harvesting these visions in the effort to break the barriers of an unconscious existence? This interpretation is heightened by the unlikely acceptance of the narrator's bizarre schemes by his legion of employees, the odd patina of unreality that coats his more deeply etched material theatre. Other hints point to the fact that the narrator may, in fact, have died in the accident, in which case these enacted visions may be part of the process of shedding his spirit of its material ties through a spiraling ascendence unto the empyrean. Or has he been given some manner of gift through his traumatic experience? And such gifts bear their own thorns: an amorality to how he is using people, and a callousness in his demands and interests—he also cuts himself off from any and all people not of service in the attainment of his weird, compulsive need. Do all great artists need become, in some measure, baser humans? Does a great inner drive demand an abatement of one's humanity? McCarthy raises a bevy of tantalizing questions, whilst never offering hard or complete answers. It is merely put out there for every reader to determine on their own. And the ending, ah, the ending; for the umpteenth time, not at all what I had expected, but utterly apropos to everything that has gone before.It's a curious thing. I have never, in my entire life, conceived an overriding passion for anything. I'm good at many things, have developed a wide variety of interests over the years, am a jack-of-many trades, in work and in life. But I lack that burning passion that declares itself in others. Anything that I can conceive of doing I can also conceive of abandoning; anything capable of being perfected can prove satisfactory for me through mere proficiency. I've never had a favorite anything. Middle of the road, easy-going, malleable; that's how I pass my days. You cannot fake being consumed by a desire, in thrall to a drive to bring something about, meet someone, attain select goals. It's either there or it isn't. So it is that books like Remainder draw me in more deeply, hold me more rapt, than it might others. Such one-way charges, torpedoes be damned, fascinate me to the utmost, and thus the narrator of this tale provided me with a trail of existential crumbs I couldn't fail to follow but with full absorption. Four-and-a-half stars, rounded down because I'm a fickle son-of-a-bitch, and this won't be the last book by McCarthy that I read.
Rarely does a book manage to break down the habits and expectations that a reader builds up in a lifetime of reading.Novels conform to schemas: there are quests, there are obstacles to be overcome, there are the universal standbys of love, hate, sex and murder: death must come violently and suddenly in order to grip the reader and to disentangle her from the nasty feeling that it might be her destiny too one day. Of course these are broad and possibly unfair generalisations, but you get the point: the reservoir of storytelling is limited, and most authors are quite happy to wallow in the same shallows that their forebears found so reassuring. True, the 20th century saw some brave and sometimes foolhardy attempts to punt out into uncharted waters - the French nouvelle roman is perhaps the most prominent example of this - but today we are back to compendiousness, narrative and the Jonathan Franzens of this world: wise witty wordsmiths whose pat answers and worldly patter is carefully weighed against liberal Doubts and Cultured Concern as to the Future of the World. And then along comes Tom McCarthy. A writer whose books (all right, call them novels if you must) record the bravest moments of Robbe-Grillet, but make it all look so effortless and at the same time manage to entertain to the extent that you want to slap him on the back and buy him a pint. So what does happen in Remainder? Not very much, and when it does, it gets repeated time after time after time. Not exactly a recipe for success, you might think. But McCarthy's style is so casual, so insouciant, so offhand, that everything comes across as a paradox and a poser, as if there were a novel behind the novel, a story behind the story. But what could be behind it though? This is the question that occupied me in the first few run-throughs: who is his model? Is it Sartre, or perhaps Kirkegaard, or is it more contemporary, perhaps Ballard? This last option comes closest to the truth: McCarthy's protagonist in Remainder is the victim of an unexplained accident; he obsesses over memories that he believes can lead to insights if re-enacted, and when these actually are re-enacted he falls into fugues and trances that are reminiscent of the catatonic states in which so many Ballard characters spend their happiest hours.In this way the book is tinged with the atmosphere of both Vermilion Sands and Crash. The private, psychological, obsessive nature of the book all speak for a Ballardian inheritance, as does the book's later phase in which the scene moves to an abandoned airport hangar near Heathrow, a Ballardian location if ever there was one. What speaks against it though is the language, the attitude. Unlike Ballard, McCarthy writes in a modern, idiomatic, demotic style. For anyone who has lived in - or even spent time in - London, the tone and overall slant of the protagonists blank, hacked-off impassivity will be familiar, if not welcome. (A brief aside: this is a London novel with a London attitude that is so far removed from the flavourless word-strudel of The Finkler Question, that I feel inclined to suggest that Howard Jacobson should take the time to read his younger contemporary's effort - and learn.)The city pervades and invades every aspect of the book: places are always described with the utmost accuracy, whether Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, a bank in Chiswick or a lawyer's office in Islington. But more than geography, it's about texture: the brick dust, chewing gum, tarry oil and generic filth that defines the urban environment: a world of tawdry minutiae in which the protagonist loses himself and temporarily escapes the apparent meaninglessness of his existence.It seems that the more I write the more there is to say with this book. Because I haven't even started describing the actual story, if that's a meaningful label for what happens here.What does happen is a curious set of events that begins with something unexplained falling from the sky. This object injures the novels protagonist so severely that he spends several months in hospital: initially comatose, then without the use of his limbs, and eventually in the hands of a physiotherapist who re-teaches him basic movements, from holding objects to eating and finally walking. This is related in flashback on the day when "the settlement", a payment of eight million pounds from whoever let the unknown object fall on our hero, arrives. After overcoming the initial shock of receiving such a massive payout, he wonders what to do with the money and rejects his friend Dave's hedonism - sniff cocaine of the back of the best-looking prostitute you can find until the money runs out - and his not-quite girlfriend Caroline's altruistic suggestion that he donate the money to a charity in Africa. In fact he has very little idea of what to do until he goes to a party and discovers a crack in the bathroom wall that triggers a set of previously concealed memories. In these memories he lives at the top of a block in a flat that also has a bathroom with a similar crack in the wall, sick but living plants in the hallway and a rear window view of a courtyard where black cats stalk languidly over red rooftops while in the flat below an elderly woman fries liver and in the flat below hers a melancholy pianist practices all day long. Other details also emerge: a motorbike freak who spends hours in the yard tinkering with his machine and a concierge who is present but quite static. In the midst of this memory is another: the memory of moving through the flat completely at ease in the world: he remembers gliding through the rooms like a dancer, without even thinking about his movements, opening the fridge in a fluid, lyrical movement and not having to think about what he was doing. Of course this plays with the reader's expectations on several levels: is this a psychological problem, a philosophical problem or rather something in the aesthetic realm? All three ideas are handsomely treated, though none is finally excused. We are kept in suspense between the various possibilities, with connotations, cultural cross-references and symbolically loaded reverberations whizzing around the echo-chamber of Mr. McCarthy's wonderful machine. I could go on now, but I haven't got the time. It's a wonderful book. More later...
What do You think about Remainder (2007)?
"The Remainder" won the Believer book award, and I thought that gave it a good shot towards being something I would like. Boy, I was wrong. This book is awful. It starts out okay, but then it just devolves into the most painful exercise in futility - which may be the point, but God, this book made me mad.The unnamed narrator has come into a huge sum of money by being hit by a flying object. He barely remembers the accident but now he has an ungodly amount of money and nothing to do with it. He also doesn't feel anything. He hires a guy to help him reenact events of his life, over and over and over again, with the hope that it will help him feel again. His life becomes a giant piece of performance art, and eventually his obsessions become more and more brutal, leading to the climax, which is totally, woefully predictable in my opinion.I wanted to like this book. I think maybe I should have liked this book. I HATED THIS BOOK.
—Jamie
Finally, I finished reading Remainder by Tom McCarthy. I have been reading this 300-something page book, which I purchased based on a recommendation from McSweeney’s, for weeks. Today, I willed myself to finish it.My professors at the University of Maryland, Merrill Feitell and Maud Casey, constantly discuss the importance of the first fifty pages of a book. They believe that these introductory pages can make or break a novel.When Victor LaValle spoke to our workshop, he recalled what it had been like to judge a novel competition; hundreds and hundreds of books were sent to him, and he had no choice but to screen them. If the fifty pages were compelling, he would continue reading. If the fifty pages said nothing of interest, he had to put the book aside.I was more generous than LaValle might have been with McCarthy’s book. After fifty pages, this is all the reader learns: a young guy loses his memory after a horrible accident (unnamed), and his lawyer manages to settle for eight and a half million pounds, which the young man invests in the stock market with the help of a financial adviser.McCarthy’s writing isn’t even all that compelling.From the very beginning of the book, the dialogue is painful to read. Words that characters exchange in this novel are boring and unnecessary:“‘Does this champagne smell like cordite to you?’ I asked.‘What?’ said Greg.‘Cordite,’ I said, raising my voice above the music.‘Cordite?’ Greg said, raising his voice too. ‘What does cordite smell like?’‘This,’ I answered.‘I don’t think so,’ Greg said.”I bet even Tom McCarthy would think that this dialogue is inane and boring, if he were to read it right here, outside the context of his imagination. Most of the conversations in the book follow this particular example, and I found myself skipping through many character interactions to get to the book’s strongest point: the narrator’s thoughts.Starting on page 64, for a few brief moments, the novel gets really good. The narrator is at a party, and he experiences a strong sense of deja vu while staring at a crack in the wall of a bathroom. McCarthy writes: “I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror…I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom.” I will spare you the entire passage because the narrator repeats the same thing over and over, basically.This idea, however, is interesting to me. For the first time since the accident, the narrator remembers something, possibly from the life he lead before the accident. What’s even more compelling is how he responds to his sudden emotional upheaval. He is so moved by this deja vu, which made him feel “real,” that he decides to find a way to reenact the scene in the bathroom.He hires a project manager, Naz, to help him find “reenactors” to play the roles of the people that he imagined and dedicates his money to the purchase of a building just like the one he remembered, with the same crack carefully made in a bathroom modeled after the one at the party.Just when he thinks everything is perfect, everything goes wrong. He realizes that life is too volatile and random to allow for the manifestation of his desires.That realization comes around page 150. One hundred and fifty more pages to go.The narrator decides to reenact all types of events that occur to him in his “real” life, like a trip to the car mechanic, a murder he read about in the newspaper, and a bank hold-up. Naz never questions why he continually wants to reenact these events. The narrator has an idea, they execute the idea, he is generally unsatisfied, and then he moves on to the next whim. Over and over for one hundred pages.I really liked some of McCarthy’s ideas, and I thought this book had a lot of potential. I mean, I did finish reading the book, despite all the issues that I had with it. I wanted to see if McCarthy would be able to develop this idea, the narrator’s desire for staging his most moving moments, and turn it into something that would make for a good story, one that could move forward and evolve. As it turns out, this was a horrible story but a great concept.McCarthy seems to me to be a great thinker but a horrible storyteller. I liked the ending, but that, like much of the rest of the book, worked on its own as an isolated incident that gave me no insight into the narrator as a character and demonstrated neither change nor evolution. I don’t think the person at the end of the book is the person at the beginning of the book, but I don’t understand how McCarthy got from point A to point B.Maybe I will have to reenact my reading of Remainder in order for me to better understand. Who wants to see me read five pages and then throw a book down in boredom and frustration?
—Laryssa Wirstiuk
I was thinking the exact same thing! I keep pulling my nose out of it and craving the need to just talk about it to someone. I have at least one moment per page where I stop for a second and go "whooooooooooooooohhhhh, this guy is BATSHIT! Im loving it. Having Asperger's syndrome myself I can relate to *some* of his thoughts (the non-sociopathic ones) and I can relate to *some* of the OCD, but this guy is the most extreme case Ive ever heard of. I really congratulate Tom McCarthy on drawing such an insane character. I LOVE insane characters and I especially love "spirals into madness" scenarios.Im SO afraid of what this guy is going to do next. Note that as I write this Im 225 pages so please check my progress bar to see where Im at before any spoilers...
—Jenne
