C

Well, I read it, but I am not sure what to think.  For one thing, on the surface, it feels as though it couldn't possibly be written by the same guy.  But then again, there's no one else who could have written it.  It is, like Remainder, a strange book masquerading as a normal one.  Both books are about connections, metaphors, and the power of the mind to create its own worlds.  Both contain the smell of cordite, and narrators who fall into trances and mishear what other people are saying.

C is an episodic bildungsroman about Serge Carrefax, son of the founder of a school for the deaf, brother of a suicide, casual scientist, possible sociopath.  The episodes in question are variations on a theme, or rather on themes: networks, communication, the complexity and interplay among various human endeavors.  There is no plot, other than the wandering course of Serge's life: idyllic childhood, tragic loss, strange illness, war experience, fateful research trip.  What happens here isn't the point, though--the theme is what it's all about, and everything is about the theme.

McCarthy is riffing here, in other words.  This is something he can do--the writing is spectacular, for the most part.  The novel is spilling over with historical research about the technology of the early twentieth century; characters routinely predict the future of communication here, or traffic in the kind of metaphors we use today to describe computers and the internet.  The characters are, in the end, entirely subservient to these ideas and historical details; they're performers putting on a play about what Tom McCarthy is interested in.  (And yes--there is a play within this play, a pageant performed by the deaf chilrden who, in one of the book's central ironies, can't hear themselves speak.)

This might sound cold and pretentious; in fact the book is, at times, utterly absorbing and quite moving.  Certain scenes are evoked with uncanny beauty, as when the child Serge witnesses a sexual tryst that will color his erotic experiences for the rest of his life; or when his plane crashes in no man's land, and a plague of birds arrives to peck at the blasted remains of his compatriots; or when he and a lover screw upon a pile of mummies.  But the mode of writing is detached; point of view is fluid, and one feels as though the book does not belong to the characters, but to the writer and reader.

I never fully owned it, personally.  The last section is a true disappointment--it consists almost entirely of expository dialogue, and ends in a delirious virtuoso recapitulation of every symbol and metaphor in the novel--but nevertheless has a certain mad rigor.  It's impressively bizarre and not really successful, like most things that I admire.  I recommend the book with reservations, but have reservations about my reservations.  I will most certainly read the next one, and all the ones after that.

What happened to "Men In Space"?

So.  I'm re-reading Tom McCarty's Remainder for my graduate seminar, and am reminded how amazing this novel is--I think it's going to be considered an extraordinarily important book when all's said and done, and in any event it is hugely entertaining and a major influence on the book I'm trying to write right now.  And I've got McCarthy's new one, C, waiting in the queue for the moment the semester ends.

But what happened to Men In Space?  This novel is not listed in the opening pages of C, and wasn't mentioned in the recent NYTBR review.  If I'm not mistaken the reviewer referred to C as McCarthy's second book.  Men In Space only seemed to come out in the UK, and at the moment (see link) it is listed as out of stock on Amazon.co.uk.

Out of stock?  Really?  Published in 2007, by a major author with a new novel out, and it's out of stock? I have a copy that I ordered from England, and must confess that I didn't get through it--at least not on my first sortie.  But it is definitely the same guy--it employs the same photo as Remainder.

I shouldn't be confused--I am a guy who had a book that only came out in the UK myself, and that kind of disappeared in the wilds of lit obscura for a while, until it finally came out here last year.  But McCarthy is different--he wrote a Big Book.  You'd think this second novel would have come out here by now, one way or another.

Any insights, keepers of Lit Arcana?

Is Postmodernism Over?

No, this isn't what you think. Like most of you, I just read Zadie Smith's lovely Times piece, Two Paths For The Novel. And while I haven't read Netherland, and probably won't, I think Remainder is a brilliant, extraordinary book, and I recommend it to everyone I can. Nevertheless, I have to ask if postmodernism is done for. The origin of this question lies, oddly, in John Lanchester's critic-at-large piece in this week's New Yorker, about the collapse of the financial markets. At one point, he's talking about derivatives, monetary abstractions which bear little relation to the assets they are supposed to represent, and the trade of which has contributed hugely to our recent drop over the edge of the earth. Here is the money quote, or rather the poverty quote:

With derivatives, we seem to enter a modernist world in which risk no longer means what it means in plain English, and in which there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense...If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism.

The recent crash is entirely self-referential, reminding us that most of the money we've been earning and spending over the past fifteen years has been imaginary. The consequences of the crash, of course, are horribly real.

This phenomenon, coupled with the death of David Wallace, got me thinking that maybe this whole idea is dead. Perhaps we have had quite enough of pretending. And reading Smith's review doesn't do much to change my mind. For one thing, I think that her argument is based upon a false dichotomy. "The two novels are antipodal," she writes, "indeed one is the strong refusal of the other." And yes, these books appear very different. But they are not responses to one another, and they are not opposites. They're two very different personal reactions to a cultural moment, and there is room in the world for both of them, along with the thousands of other books that have been written about that same moment. There are not two paths for the novel. The paths for the novel are infinite.

I don't mean to take Smith to task; in fact, her review is superb, when it hews to the works themselves, their strengths and failings. What I am suggesting is dead (not, I assure you, declaring) is the notion of postmodernism as a discrete area of artistic endeavor. I'm suggesting that maybe it's time to stop betting the house on postmodernism, and admit to ourselves once and for all that it is merely a quality inherent to narrative--indeed, to artistic expression. Hamlet is about writing, Bach's Inventions are about music. And painting has always been about painting. What's perhaps over is not self-referentiality, but our torrid affair with self-regard. Maybe our cultural preoccupation with cultural preoccupation is what made us consider it reasonable to invest all our money in the idea of investing our money. The distinction is semantic, but I think important.

The ideas that make Remainder a great book are real. They are part of how we see ourselves, rather than abstract concepts about seeing. I'm not proposing that Remainder is postmodern, and thus Remainder is dead; I'm proposing that Remainder is realism, and the real encompasses the imaginary, and not the other way around.

My Remainder Post

Rhian intimated that I would be more articulate than she in my admiration for Tom McCarthy's Remainder, but I find myself at as much a loss as she was. It's a very peculiar piece of work, and one I enjoyed enormously--in fact I quickly added it to the syllabus of this "Weird Stories" class I'm teaching this semester.

It reminds me, as it did R., of Magnus Mills, but also of Kazuo Ishiguro, and to some extent The Magic Mountain. It's a book in which the narrator is concealing something from the reader, and possibly from himself as well. It's also about memory, a favorite subject of mine. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it is how completely is succeeds in the very ambitions I set for myself in writing my current novel-in-progress--though McCarthy and I are writing to different ends. I hope my book ends up being a tenth as absorbing as his.

The story, such as it is, is about a man who, in the wake of a mysterious accident, has an epiphany while staring at a crack in the wall of a friend's bathroom, which epiphany leads him to embark upon a series of increasingly elaborate re-enactments of apparently meaningless moments, in the hope of...well, we don't have any idea why he's doing it, actually. The plot is not quite the point here, though--it's the voice, which lives on this razor's edge between utterly convincing and completely unbelievable, and it's that sense of impending and inevitable collapse that drives the novel. He pretty much pulls it off in the end, though I found myself wishing it weren't so...Fight-Clubby. That said, if there was no such thing as Fight Club, I might have had no problem with it at all.

In any event, its success is derived from its attention the detail--it is, in fact, about detail itself--how we remember it, and how those memories create meaning. It would be the perfect assigned text to accompany my "ordinariness" post of last week--it shows that the ordinary is extraordinary, in as strange and satisfying a manner possible.

As for my novel...for better or worse, I'm sending it out tomorrow. How a person knows when his novel is finished is a topic for another day. (Although, hint: a person has no goddam idea.)

Buying Books

Books are too freaking expensive. For years I didn't buy any new hardcover books, except for gifts, but managed to fill all available book shelves with used books and paperbacks. (My book-storage secret: build a long shelf all the way around a room at the top of the windows. It's wasted space -- you might as well fill it with books.)

Then I started working at an independent bookstore. It's bad enough that I spend the day handling and shelving and flipping through all the cool new books, but I get a discount AND feel like I'm supporting the store when I buy books. I no longer have any resistance whatsoever. It feels almost like a compulsion, like gambling.

Today, even though I'm still reading The Lay of the Land and De Lillo's Falling Man and Julian and George and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train, I bought a new book that I found mysteriously irresistible: Tom McCarthy's Remainder. I'd never heard of the guy, or the book, but every page I opened to seemed full of great little bits and small thrills. I can imagine one might experience the same sense of impending pleasure when buying a lotto scratch ticket.

I'll tell you what it feels like: it feels like all the books are going to disappear and I have to gather as many as possible before they're gone. It's nuts, I know. But there is definitely something in the air.