RSSOriginally published in the San Diego City Beat
Remainder
By Tom McCarthy
(Vintage Books)
Remainder is the kind of book that will make you giggle at its witty and meticulous descriptions, impress you with its near-perfect prose and leave you scratching your head. Author Tom McCarthy, a 40-something Englishman who calls himself the general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that holds hearings, writes reports and manifestos, and fucks with journalists through media interventions, does such a fantastic job at getting the reader inside the mind of Remainder’s nameless main character that things get confusing at times.
A victim of a traumatic accident, the man is awarded £8.5 million in the elusive “Settlement”—the reader is never privy to the terms surrounding the incident; all that is known is something fell from the sky. Bored with the world, people and ideas, the now austere and eccentric character uses the money to recreate a moment when he felt most real—he describes it as an instinctive authenticity he had before the accident. He buys buildings, recreates scenes inside the buildings and even hires full-time re-enactors to help him achieve this feeling. Things spiral out from there, getting more and more absurd until the gun-blazing end.
The book, thanks to McCarthy’s artful writing, is an enjoyable mind-twisting romp through one man’s creative way of spending time. Reading it is time well spent.