The Fourth Annual Believer Book Award
—Hereby Presented To
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
“What’s the most intense, clear memory you have?” asks the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. “The one you can see even if you close your eyes—really see, clear as in a vision?” Dispensing with Proustian reminiscence, McCarthy brazenly assumes the role of conceptual artist and literally reconstructs moments of time. In the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy tells its story through architecture in book form, Remainder is an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.
After enduring hospitalization due to an undisclosed falling “something,” the novel’s nameless narrator receives a massive corporate reparation, which gives his post-traumatic mind the opportunity to fund any bizarre project it imagines. In this case, that means physically realizing his memories and quasi-metaphysical visions, creating a fantasy world he can inhabit for the duration of the book.
On the surface, the narrator is concerned with uncomplicated things, such as “blue liquid gushing out of an air conditioning unit” or “taking a carrot in your right hand”—but as with William S. Burroughs or Raymond Roussel, there exists a remarkable system of intersecting ideas governing every detail of Remainder’s hermetic universe. McCarthy conjures miniature worlds and explores the fabric of time with the creative ambition usually reserved for science fiction authors. Every movement of every character is McCarthy’s way of asking his larger question: What does it means to be an authentic human being?
McCarthy wields all the literary essentials—neurosis, repression, subconscious desires, etc.—but wields them like newfangled weapons, aiming them into strange little pockets of life, such as déjà vu and nostalgia. He manipulates the what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars hypothetical to take free reign with his imagination, and bravely rethinks the way people act out their lives.
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AN EXCERPT FROM REMAINDER
As far as positions and movements were concerned: I took care of these myself, as before. I showed the Michelin Man boy re-enactor where to stand and sway, and the other two how to kick his head between them. I made them kick it with their legs mechanically, like zombies or robots. The driver, the person re-enacting my role, had to get out slowly. Like the concierge, he wore a white ice-hockey goaltender’s mask, so as not to overrun my personality with his—or, more precisely, so as not to impose any personality at all. I just wanted the motions and the words, all deadpan, neutral—wanted the re-enactors to act out the motions without acting and to speak the words without feeling, in disinterested voices, as monotonous as my pianist. The oldest boy had to take the tyre from the boot, carry it over to the lathe and fix it; the middling one had to attempt to help him lift it and the oldest had to push his hand away; the youngest one had to come over and then lurk outside the door. I showed them where to step, to lift, to kick, to stand. Most of the time they only had to stand, completely static.
more:
Tom McCarthy interviewed by Mark Alizart
“Art has become the place where literary ideas are received, debated, and creatively transformed.”