RSSOriginally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Rebuilding of life forgotten is a story to remember
Remainder By Tom McCarthy
Vintage, 308 pp. $13.95
Sunday, March 11, 2007
John Freeman
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,” Jane Austen wrote in “Mansfield Park.” The hero of this odd, beautiful little novel might disagree. At the beginning of “Remainder,” he is awarded 8.5 million pounds in a legal settlement for an accident that put him in a coma. Upon getting the news from his lawyer, the unnamed man’s first sensation is of joy - then boredom. He doesn’t want to go anywhere; he doesn’t wish for a fine car. Champagne now tastes to him of cordite.
What he really wants is to capture happiness - a sense of being right in the world, the very thing of which his accident has robbed him. And herein lies another problem: His only experience with this feeling is in the past.
So, like many amnesiacs before him, our narrator decides to reassemble his life. He talks to friends, watches his old memories as they return episodically. “It hadn’t been particularly exciting,” he says, glimpsing his past.
As in the best amnesiac stories, from the work of Cornell Woolrich to Nicole Krauss’ debut novel, “Man Walks Into a Room,” writer Tom McCarthy holds a wry, deadpan tone cleanly throughout. He helps things along by picking out just the right amount to detail. The action clearly takes place in London, but the city isn’t described well - just a few details: a coffee bar, the man’s block, the people he knows.
This lends an eerie, eternal present tenseness to the action that becomes more significant as the story progresses. No matter how hard the man tries, he cannot regain those moments of past pleasure. He decides he needs a full-scale immersion in the pastness of the past. And what happens next is one of the most bizarre stories in years.
Slowly, methodically, then with increasing franticness, the man decides to re-enact parts of his life. He starts big, buying a building and redecorating it so that it looks exactly like one he once lived in - right down to the scuffed floors, the chipped paint, even the cats that walked across the roof. He hires actors to re-enact the roles of his neighbors: the handsome man fixing his motorcycle, the old woman cooking liver, the pianist forever making mistakes.
The building becomes the hero’s real-life memory palace; a dollhouse of sorts, too, with the central character dictating all the players’ movements. McCarthy strikes just the right sort of matter-of-fact tone here. The world has recently been reassembled for his hero, and so McCarthy’s prose feels that way, too.
Traveling around London, looking for things, having experiences, then deciding they need to be re-enacted, the narrator achieves what the Buddhists call a state of mindfulness. Since he has relearned how to walk, talk, even lift a pencil, he is hyperaware. The present is one giant bolt of texture, and all “the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from being alive” is gone.
In an odd way, then, his coma and emergence from it are his true settlement- the money is simply a helpful tool. It allows him to have almost no friction with the world. If he wants something done, McCarthy’s hero hires a firm.
Yet the harder McCarthy’s hero tries to reach “ground zero of perfection,” the more artificial, bizarre and ritualized his life becomes. In a very subtle way, McCarthy is saying something about our attitude toward pleasure. Fleeting moments no longer count; we require the best all the time. Then we discover the pursuit of this goal turns fetishistic.
“Remainder” originally was published in Paris in a limited run by an art-house press, a provenance which calls to mind another great novel about memory - Marcel Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” The time that we have at our disposal every day is “elastic,” Proust wrote, “the passion we feel expands it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains.”
“Remainder” imagines a world in which habit - sadly, weirdly, sometimes beautifully - is all that remains for its poor hero. In McCarthy’s hands, it also makes for an unforgettable story.
Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.