Surplus Matter

The novel is set at the dawn of wireless technology, but it is about the whole history of human invention and discovery. It’s something like historical fiction about the roots and threads of the looming future; the tendrils tugging toward some unforeseen nascent reality, full of all its technological “advances” moving us toward and away from our humanity. It is set in the past, about the present, and inspired by the future. It is also about how technology lets us project our yearning and mourning into eternal wavelengths.

Ben Kupstas reviews C in NYC’s The L Magazine.

McCarthy’s book doesn’t seem to me to be alive. This may, however, be his intention.

Jen Craig (Australia) reviews C.

Stefan Eklund on Tom McCarthy’s C in Sweden’s SvD.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Michael Silverblatt on LA’s KCRW radio station.

C remains bookies’ favourite ahead of tonight’s Man Booker award ceremony. Links from the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and BBC Radio 4.

[M]aybe McCarthy’s aesthetic program is semi-fictitious too, an elaborate performance culminating in the publication of C. This artist plays the role of overzealous postmodern novelist with insouciant accuracy. Why turn a once-revolutionary movement into an orthodoxy, other than to kill it?

Philip Hopkins reviews C for Bookslut.

The history of Tom McCarthy’s debut, Remainder, has almost achieved legendary status. It was first released on a tiny Parisian art press, having been spurned by all the major publishing houses in Britain, yet ended up making the cover of the New York Times, receiving the 2008 Believer Book Award and being lauded by Zadie Smith as “one of the great English novels of the past ten years”. Where do you go from there? Backwards, of course, like Dr. Learmont’s face that seems to multiply “down a telescoping corridor of memories” or the archaeologists in Egypt — not to mention Serge with his predilection for coitus a tergo. McCarthy’s second novel, Men in Space, was mostly written before his first. His third — which is being touted as his big breakthrough — stems from Calling All Agents (2003), a fascinating essay that already contained all the keys to his book to come. Imagine a Bible concordance predating The Bible itself. In fact, C is CAA re-encrypted: a space in which the event that is true literature can take place.

Andrew Gallix reviews C.

Realism is just a literary convention like any other. For me where it does break down is the question of liberal humanism or sentimental humanism on the one hand, and on the other a writing that’s informed and inspired by modernism and you know a rainbow coalition of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, the avant-garde, all these exhilirating things that happened in the last 100 years. Lots of things contemporary fiction seems determined to ignore.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Michael Slenske in Interview.

Perhaps these are books more to be talked about than read. It’s likely the revolution will not be written anyway. But looking past all the posturing there is at least the spirit of an important movement afoot in both these works, even if it sometimes seems like two steps forward and one step back.

Alex Good reviews C along with Lee Rourke’s The Canal.

Ladbrokes yesterday suspended betting on the Man Booker prize after a flurry of bets supporting Tom McCarthy’s novel C. The bookmaker’s spokesperson David Williams said £15,000-worth of bets were placed on C on Wednesday morning, completely outstripping all earlier betting on the prize, which had previously totalled just £10,000 since the announcement of the longlist in July.

Benedicte Page in the Guardian on the betting controversy surrounding C.