Can anything stop him? In the space of a few months, Tom McCarthy has gone from being 3:AM Book of the Year to New York Times Books Review cover feature. Liesl Schillinger writes in today’s issue:
“What can you say to a writer who invents a character so perverse and controlling that he accuses the sun of poor job performance and employs squadrons of house hunters with no intention of seeing their picks, simply because their efforts will ‘scare my building out, like beaters scaring pheasants out of bushes for a lord to shoot’? What can you say to a writer who invents a world that contains the sentences: ‘I’ll start the liver and the cats. We’ll take it from there’? Only one thing can be said to such a person: Tell me more.
… McCarthy’s premise — a man seeks to reassure himself of the genuineness of his existence — is a leitmotif of the science-fiction thriller, a genre with which he has an unusually intimate connection. McCarthy serves as the general secretary of what his publisher describes as a ‘semifictitious avant-garde network’ in London, the International Necronautical Society. In a sense, he doesn’t just write science fiction; he lives it.
Such a person cannot have chosen the well-worn theme of Remainder unadvisedly. The subject of identity — how human memory and reality might be manipulated by outside agents — features in countless futuristic books, stories and films, and has been especially popular in the last decade as advances in the visual, auditory and surgical arts have made us increasingly wary of trusting our senses. But McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make Remainder more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny. McCarthy shows that philosophy, like history, can repeat itself as farce. And in this farce, the slamming doors swing shut in slo-mo, reopening only to slowly close yet again.
With its devious logic and compulsive mood, Remainder recalls Sartre’s 1938 showpiece of existential philosophy, Nausea, a novel about a small-time historian, Roquentin, unnerved by the existence of inanimate objects — which disgust him, confuse him and make him doubt his own significance. ‘When they touch me, it’s unbearable,’ Roquentin reflects. ‘I’m as fearful of entering into contact with them as if they were living creatures.’ When he holds a damp pebble, he experiences ‘a kind of nausea in my hands.’
In the same way, McCarthy’s antihero narrator feels threatened by the ‘messy, irksome’ physical world. Oil spots, grunge, coffee grounds — any stain-leaving substance — distress him because they seem more fully alive than he is. The persistence of these traces of ‘surplus’ matter — the remainders of the novel’s title — both repels and fascinates him. Yet because he doubts the solidity of his own existence as a human being, he surrounds himself with enough remainders to provide a reassuringly packed context — not only the detritus of everyday life but made-to-order roofs and walls, staircases strewn with cigarette butts, and phony tenants, all magicked into stage sets where he can fit in, like a doll in a toy house. ‘I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again,’ he explains. But when he finds himself occupying a space he can’t control, he feels nauseous.
In Sartre’s novel, Roquentin keeps a detailed journal to convince himself of the singularity of his existence, taking care not ‘to let any nuances or small facts escape, even if they seem insignificant’. He argues that ‘in order for the most banal event to become an adventure, it is necessary, and sufficient, to retell it’. But if you get too caught up in the retelling, do you lose track of the reality? Roquentin decides it doesn’t matter. ‘Man is, above all, a storyteller,’ he reasons. ‘He lives surrounded by his stories and by those of others. He sees everything that happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.’ As for authenticity, he scoffs: ‘As if there could be true stories! Things happen one way, we tell them in another.’
While Roquentin passively processes his actual experiences to pad his back story, McCarthy’s detached Everyman plays a more active role. Empowered by his windfall wealth, he becomes an existential tyrant, enlisting Londoners to re-enact actual local events — a car tuneup, a drive-by shooting, a chat in a corridor — as if to furnish himself with a real-life, real-time video collection, performed by expendable extras, eternally on call. What damage this may do to the psyches of the re-enactors is immaterial. How can a man who doubts his own reality take anyone else’s seriously? …”
The New York Times have also published the first chapter of Remainder. Check out the podcast in which the novel is also discussed.
(Pictures: (top) Andrew Gallix, (middle) Alisa Connan.)
