A Review of Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"
Tom McCarthy is a novelist and artist of English origin who was born in 1969. In 1999, he became involved with the International Necronautical Society, a loose affiliation of intellectuals, including Simon Critchley and Anthony Auerbach, with the purpose of creating literary and cultural subversive events in the style of older avant-garde groups such as the Surrealists and the Situationist International. McCarthy also worked in several other capacities as an editor and writer before his first novel, Remainder was published in 2005.
A Hopeful Beginning
The publication of Remainder is an interesting story that seems designed to give hope to aspiring novelists having a hard time finding a publisher. Initially, English publishing houses showed little interest in McCarthy's first novel. Eventually, the book was published by a small French publisher that specialized in art books. Remainder found distribution in museums and galleries, where it slowly earned the attention and acclaim of mainstream media publications. Finally, it was republished by a large U. K. press in 2006 and found its way to publication in the United States in 2007.
A Promising Plot
Remainder is the story of an individual who regains his memory after a serious traumatic event. His lawyer has managed to settle with the responsible party for a large sum of money. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, appears to be at something of a loss for how to interact with the world he has come to re-know, and in the first few pages the reader is given the impression of someone who has regained his memory but perhaps not his personality, his sanity, his "old self." The reader is immediately struck by the narrator's strange syntax and the not-quite-normal way he chooses to relate the details of his life. So, McCarthy's novel begins promisingly: here is a very strange man with a very large sum of money, and the immediate drama of this situation, along with McCarthy's intriguing style, grips readers immediately, never to let go.
A Page-Turner
It is fitting to mention at this point that Remainder, unlike many of its counterparts in contemporary English fiction, is what is often referred to as a "real page-turner." Although the plot summary of the novel immediately brings to mind authors like Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, the others might be accused of a tendency to invent outlandish, half-ironic stories and to develop them in challenging, almost obtuse novels that cause one to wonder whether the reward is equal to the effort required to read them. Good literature is often, if not always, challenging in some way, and many of the famous novels ever written are slow-going at best. So many of our contemporary novelists, however, seem to have missed the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. They seem to deny the reader all instant gratification out of a mistaken belief that this will, by itself, elevate their work beyond what their artistry alone would warrant.
Not so Tom McCarthy, who imbues his protagonist with a sinewy style that propels the reader forward almost like a heartbeat, pausing for an instant of tension before contracting with all its might to keep the novel's action circulating. What's so remarkable about this is not that, with Remainder, McCarthy has managed to keep the reader interested for 300 or so pages. Writing something distracting isn't hard, as the best-paid "writers" in the English-speaking world will affirm. What's remarkable about McCarthy's novel is that, in all its brevity and excitement, it manages to fully address some of the issues that contemporary novelists have typically met with only half-success.
A Singular Experience
Themes of death, possibility, reality, imagination, authenticity, and repetition have been in vogue in English literature for quite some time, and the biggest names in the book world have stunned readers with their willingness to address these issues at all. This, one can only surmise, has gained these writers popularity among readers who have never read the literary classics (Faulkner, Musil, Virginia Woolf) that so markedly eclipse their contemporary heirs. If anything new has arisen in the popular literature of the last few decades, it is the willingness to cater to readers who are, increasingly, gluttons for pointless confusion. One reads DeLillo, for example, having been as charitable as possible in the act, and afterward one wonders what one has really gained, if anything.
Tom McCarthy, along with a small number of others, now rising to prominence, seems poised to rescue the literary world from this embarrassing trend. With Remainder, McCarthy gives us something real to think about, makes a real point or two, confounds us meaningfully, for once, and manages to keep us on the edge of our seats at the same time. To say more would be to spoil this singular reading experience, which should be approached with as little foreknowledge as possible, except that Remainder is, without a doubt (for once), worth it.
