Tom McCarthy is interviewed by Sarah Crown in Claire Armistead’s Guardian Books Podcast (10 September 2010)
Sarah Crown starts off by describing C as “definitely a Marmite book” given the critical reactions (although she is herself “enthusiastic” about it). After reading an extract from his novel, Tom McCarthy explains that networks and “chains of associations” are the way literature works, and also how our mental activity functions according to Freud. The journalist states that C feels closer to poetry, at times, than to fiction. Tom replies that “If the novel was a car, the engine would be poetry (the exterior would be prose and plot)”. The author goes on to praise EM Forster whom he describes as “a big presence in the book” and presents as a proto-psychogeographer. Finally, he rejects the common description of C as an “experimental” novel. This is, he says, “a lazy label used by lazy journalists to sideline a type of writing that doesn’t conform to a certain model of sentimental humanism which is the default mode in publishing and in our culture at large“. He points out that every significant novel from Tristram Shandy to Ulysses could be described as an “anti-novel”: “Any interesting art is conducting some kind of experiment, otherwise it’s just genre“.
C has also made the cover of the the New York Times’s prestigious Book Review (as did Remainder).
First posted: Friday, September 10th, 2010.
