RSSRobert Collins, “The Novel: Rewound and Remixed,” The Sunday Times 4 July 2010
Could Tom McCarthy, a 41-year-old Londoner with an experimental streak, be the future of fiction?
Tom McCarthy: ‘I haven’t read most contemporary British writers’ (Nick Cunard)
Less than a century ago, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took the 19th-century realist novel and forged it into the blinding experimental thunderbolt of high modernism. Ninety years later, with more novels being published than ever, and most of them uniformly aiming for the same realist goal, it’s as if Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway had never happened. Where did the zeal for unfettered innovation go? Even in the brilliantly able hands of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith or Ian McEwan, the novel has regressed almost completely to its realist origins. With commercial expectations in publishing more desperate and unforgiving than ever, the room for experimentation has shrunk to virtually nil.
A recent book, Reality Hunger, by the American author David Shields, has generated febrile literary chatter about the novel’s future. Shields argues that the form, tied to phoney invention and creaky artifice, is no longer a viable medium for the tastes of the hyperconnected age, with its urge towards hybridisation and cross-pollination. Nonfiction — memoir, the lyric essay, rap, all freed from fiction’s dusty strictures — is where it’s at.
You can see novelists showing chronic signs of fiction fatigue. The twice Booker-winner and Nobel laureate JM Coetzee has strayed ever deeper into autobiography in his novels, and has rallied to Shields’s cry: “I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings.” He was joined by Smith, who recently swore off writing another novel and, “out of exactly the kind of novel-nausea Shields describes”, decided to produce a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. “Novels,” she writes, “are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing — especially if you happen to have written one.”
Novelists, catching the mood of despair, are falling like flies, turning to what now appears as the verdant, promising land of nonfiction. This year alone, Chinua Achebe, Jonathan Safran Foer, Siri Hustvedt and Rupert Thomson have published nonfiction debuts. There are, of course, fiction writers of astounding virtuosity out there, such as Mitchell, McEwan or Hilary Mantel. But these novelists are, it is no disparagement to say, going through the motions. Where’s the novelty, the newness, that the novel promised in Joyce and Woolf’s hands? The contemporary novel’s not dead. It’s sleepwalking.
Then along comes Tom McCarthy. Forty-one, and born in London, McCarthy has stood until recently at the outer edges of the literary world. With his third novel, C, a supercharged, fizzingly written Bildungsroman about a morphine-addicted radio operator in the early decades of the 20th century, he is arguably about to take his place at its centre.
McCarthy’s debut, Remainder, relatively unheard of at the time, was hailed by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books as the salvation of modern fiction, a work uniquely exhibiting the power “to shake the novel out of its present complacency”.
Yet when McCarthy originally finished the novel in 2001, it was turned down by every publisher he showed it to.
In it, a nameless man living in Brixton wins £8.5m damages for an unspecified accident and spends the lot re-creating an apartment block — complete with actors playing neighbours and passers-by — in which, he believes, he remembers once feeling “authentic”.
With its themes of re-enactment and repetition, Remainder was the 21st-century heir to JG Ballard’s Crash. But publishers were flatly unimpressed. “They went, ‘Well, it’s just not like a proper book,’” McCarthy recalls. “And I said, ‘Haven’t you read Beckett?’” To which their answer was, simply, no.
So, like Beckett, the novel instead found a home in Paris, where it was released by the art publisher Metronome Press, which in 2005 printed it in a limited edition and sold it as an art work. “You could buy it at the Tate bookshop or at the ICA,” McCarthy laughs, “but not at Waterstone’s. When Waterstone’s asked for it, the publisher said, ‘F*** off, you can’t have it.’” Having piqued the book world’s curiosity, the novel was finally bought by a small independent publisher in London, Alma Books, and by Random House in America. It became, by a circuitous route, a bestseller.
McCarthy is no conventional novelist. His friends are visual artists. He hasn’t read anything by McEwan or Mitchell. “The truth is,” he says, “I just haven’t read most contemporary British writers.” His influences are almost all non-British: Derrida, Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Heidegger, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. His living role model is David Lynch: “His film Inland Empire has a much more literary logic than most mainstream fiction. Most contemporary artists are very literate. They’ve all read Beckett and Faulkner, or William Burroughs. A shocking number of writers haven’t.”
Author Zadie Smith has happily endorsed McCarthy’s work (Francesco Guidicini)
Though he’s primarily a novelist — “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. It’s what I grew up on” — it’s instructive that McCarthy is also an artist. In 1999, he founded a “semi-fictitious” art organisation, the International Necronautical Society. (Neatly, if ironically, the organisation is touted on the second page of Shields’s book as a touchstone for the future of art.) And it was from an art project performed by this organisation at the ICA in 2004 that C was born.
“Art at the moment is the kind of place where you can get away with that,” he says. “Publishers obviously want stuff that’s going to sell, but so much literature has become almost like this kind of vanity mirror where liberal culture can see itself reflected back. And I just don’t find that dynamic.”
McCarthy’s new novel is fascinating because, although it brims with literary allusions and symbols, it rockets along, too. Its protagonist, Serge Carrefax, is hurtled through history. He is based partly on Alexander Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and partly on Sergei Pankejeff, one of Freud’s case studies. “I think Freud’s a great novelist more than anything else,” he says, truly showing his modernist colours. “His case histories are like the most brilliant gothic fiction.”
If McCarthy — as Smith has suggested — presents a radically fresh prospect for the future of the novel, it is probably, paradoxically, because he has instinctively ignored contemporary literature almost completely. He would argue, in fact, that it is only by immersing oneself in all that has gone before that any contemporary novelist has even the faintest chance of coming up with something new. “I don’t think most writers, most commercial middlebrow writers, are doing that,” he says. “I think they’ve become too aligned with mainstream media culture and its underlying aesthetic of ‘self-expression’. I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing.”
On the evidence of C, McCarthy is quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for. “Here we are, rich inheritors of all this magnificent detritus,” he says. “How do we want to recombine it? I think it’s a good time to be a good writer, actually.”
C is published by Jonathan Cape on August 5 at £16.99; Reality Hunger by David Shields is published by Hamish Hamilton at £17.99