REMAINDER
By Tom McCarthy
Tom McCarthy's Remainder is a remarkable first novel that calls to mind
another impressive literary debut: John Fowles's The Collector. Both
books deal with young men who suddenly come into a large amount of cash:
£73,091 in 1963, £8,500,000 in today's deflated money. Wealth brings freedom,
and they are soon able to make all of their psychotic fantasies real. Their
worlds become intensely introverted and solipsistic, with other people turned
into mere facilitators and props. It is an aesthetic kind of madness, with their
forefather being the reclusive Des Esseintes in Huysmans's A Rebours.
They are both artists and audience, their goal to create the ultimate effect.
The nameless narrator of Remainder has won a metaphorical lottery,
receiving a massive settlement after being involved in some kind of
bolt-from-the-blue accident. We don't know anything about the accident, in part
because the narrator can't remember it, in part because the terms of the
settlement forbid him talking about it even if he could remember, and in part
because it's a subject he isn't very interested in. The narrator is nothing if
not narrowly focused. After idly spinning his wheels for a while, not knowing what to do
with all his loot, he receives an epiphany while staring at the crack in the
wall of a bathroom. The crack expands to a vision the size of a building. And he
dedicates his fortune, his life, and the lives of everyone else he comes in
contact with, to making that vision come to life.
Primarily what he is after is a kind of supreme authenticity. What he
identifies as authentic, however, is something entirely artificial, a way of
being that is only just "like" some preconceived, pre-scripted
reality. He has a vision of living in an apartment, what he sees from his
window, and all of the sounds and smells surrounding them. He then buys an
apartment building and has it reconstructed to look just like the way he
imagined it. He even hires people to live in the building and perform for him,
playing the same music, the same way, he heard it played in his dream. They cook
the same meat and perform the same chores. Over and over and over in an endless
loop. Even when he is not present he insists that they always be "on."
Some re-enactors even work in shifts and go round the clock. Then he has another
vision and that too has to be recreated. And while there seems no threat of his
ever running out of money, the stakes keep getting higher.
It's not clear what his obsession with the authentic artificial is meant to
signify. Though initially inspired by watching Robert DeNiro in a movie he is
adamant that his re-creations not be filmed. No cameras are allowed on any of
his sets (which are designed by professional set designers). He doesn't even
want his cast to be described as "performers." They are staff,
participants, re-enactors, tools to be used in hunting down the real, the
natural, what is "fundamental to events," the seamless and perfect
"core."
His experience of the core is like a drug. If the moment is captured just
perfectly he gets an orgasmic tingling in his spine (some vague and thematically
irrelevant physiological explanation of which is offered) and he passes out. The
spot of time expands into an interior sublime like some kind of psychic black hole.
An inflection of voice, a gesture, the shape of a stain on the ground, takes on
the weight of the universe when he's in the zone. But
in order to get his fix he keeps needing more intensely real re-enactments. He
becomes a parody of the autocratic film director, thrilling at playing God,
asking his actors to move slower and slower as the tingling increases, and even
at one point getting angry at the sun for moving across the sky the wrong way.
The book as a whole is an enjoyably self-conscious literary performance.
Echoes of other books, like The Collector and J. G. Ballard's Crash,
are obvious. There are also plenty of elements tossed in for symbol-hunters,
especially the leitmotifs of stains and cracks. The smell of cordite is
another, seeming to follow the narrator around and foreshadowing an
appearance by the Devil himself as a London borough councillor, apparently
leading the narrator on to the Other Side.
Which, one supposes, is Death: The real real, the authentic, what can't be
re-enacted or experienced vicariously. Playing God on Earth can be fun, but it
provides a diminishing buzz. Dying, imagined as a kind of transubstantiation and
ascension, is the only escape from the enduring patterns of repetition that make
up the dull round of our unnatural, second-hand existence.
Notes:
Review first published June 23, 2007.
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