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The Editors, “Up Front: Tom McCarthy,” The New York Times 14 May 2009
When Tom McCarthy agreed to review Clancy Martin’s first novel, “How to Sell,” for us, he was tempted partly by the book’s setting inside the world of crooked jewelers.
“I’ve got a longstanding fascination with the way in which economics haunts literature, and vice versa,” he said in a recent e-mail message. “You can trace the history of this haunting from Joyce, whose writing is obsessed with credit, debt and forgery, right back through Shakespeare, whose ‘Merchant of Venice’ should be required reading for all economists — especially now.”
McCarthy’s own first novel, “Remainder,” took up the “problem of counterfeit” (as he puts it in his review) by having its narrator stage elaborate re-enactments of mundane events, thus grappling with questions of reproduction and authenticity. These questions are nothing new for McCarthy, an artist as well as a writer, whose artworks often draw on the history of literature. “Right now I’ve just installed a ‘Black Box Transmitter’ in an art institute in Germany. It sends out looping sequences of poetry created by cutting up and mixing together stock market prices, weather forecasts and lines of Hölderlin. Radio really interests me at the moment. I’ve just finished a novel about early radio and its relation to poetry and death. Technology is always haunted, too: that’s what makes it so sexy.”
[Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.]