Surplus Matter

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.

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder receives The Believer’s fourth annual Book Award.

There’s a secret written into the book’s very title. McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn’t. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin — whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character’s language — as standing “guardian . . . at the heart of a noise.”

Eric Banks reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in the Los Angeles Times.

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

Tom McCarthy on the political trajectory of the Tintin cartoons and Spielberg’s forthcoming movie.

Art is traditionally praised as a process of giving form, but instead it is a necessarily inadequate attempt to reproduce in matter the artist’s concept. So inauthenticity is intrinsically bound up with art, which is “a repetitive mechanism that functions through theft, forgery, copying, and embedding.” According to the Declaration, there are two ways of reading art’s repetitive aspect. First, “art attempts to extinguish matter and achieve authenticity as a hypnotic, monotonous, endless recurrence of repetition. This produces the trancelike stasis and intense psychic tingling that we sometimes think of as aesthetic pleasure. At times, it almost feels real. Then again, so can masturbation.” Thus, the Declaration’s second reading of repetition: “Art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

Peter Schwenger deconstructs The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity.

I think if there’s any one motif that will resonate most with readers of Men in Space it’s this cycle of questioning our ability to replicate or recreate what’s already passed. McCarthy proposes that we’re seemingly condemned to always be looking back, and doing so, we’re forced to always be catching up with life, as it hurtles forward into vertiginous space.

José Teodoro reviews Men in Space in Canada’s Edmonton Journal.

Typically, Remainder’s unconventional character is expressed principally through its form, a narrativeless, first person affair where little happens in standard terms. There are no problems or solutions as such, just ideas to be explored indefinitely.

Remainder reviewed in new blog Slates.

Events, objects, even people replicate one another in a self-referential echo chamber that renders each thing the double or copy of something else, until one realizes that the “originals” cannot be found. Story and form imitate each other: This tale of art theft and forgery becomes an agitated network of substitutions and absences.

Men in Space reviewed by Thomas Wharton in the Canadian Globe and Mail.

The ending is a tribute to Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, as the fevered writer continues to emit while anticipating his own (resisted) end (”Soon I will stop. Soon . . .”). Like Beckett’s “unnameable”, he remains suspended between two worlds, hovering over the abyss. Tom McCarthy has drawn intelligently on his literary antecedent; but Men in Space is an original work in its own right, a confident and intelligent meditation on failed flights of transcendence.

Toby Lichtg reviews Men in Space in the Times Literary Supplement.

McCarthy’s characters trace elliptical orbits around each other, as if locked into flight patterns beyond their control — for instance, the dissolute routines of the artistic subculture enjoying the liberating oxygen of Vaclav Havel’s new government, or the unnamed radio surveillance operative doggedly carrying out his job long after his paymasters have been smothered by the Velvet Revolution — giving age-old themes of predestination and self-determination a crisply contemporary twist.

Dan Fox reviews Men in Space for Frieze Magazine.

This is textbook post-traumatic territory, and textbook literary alienation. The necessity — and impossibility — of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead — and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well.

Tom McCarthy reviews Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts in the London Review of Books.