Surplus Matter

A Russian review of Remainder in Kommersant.

A Kind of God With Artificial Limbs: Mark Leckey and Tom McCarthy in Conversation at London’s Chisenhale Gallery on Saturday 4 December.

Here’s the flyer for tonight’s secret Canadian gig during which Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland will discuss “books, art and the meaning of it all”.

Details of the INS Shanghai Declaration on Inauthenticity.

If a fact-checker had come to his aid, C might have won the Booker after all.

Germaine Greer in The Guardian.

Rebecca Hunt, fictional debutante of the season for her rule-flouting fantasia of Churchill’s “black dog” depression, Mr Chartwell, emerged not from any creative-writing scheme but a painting degree at Central St Martin’s school of art. As did Richard Milward, the fizzily inventive author of Apples and Ten Storeys Down. As for Man Booker finalist Tom McCarthy, although he studied English at Oxford, his fiction — from the fiercely “conceptual” Remainder onwards — bears the deep impress of a post-YBA, theory-friendly, art-school sensibility. You may detect the same mischief and audacity when it comes to story and form in the books of (say) Geoff Dyer, another writer steeped in ideas from the contemporary visual arts.

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent on art-school novelists.

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

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.

This is the golden age of the avant-garde, of futurism and modernism, and it provides McCarthy with an answer to the problem of how to write an avant-garde novel today. If modernism is history — in both senses of the world — then the modernist novel must be a historical novel, a deliberate reconstruction of a world and a way of thinking that are no longer our own. And that is what C is, at bottom: a brilliant historical novel, packed with the kind of information that is such novels’ stock-in-trade.

Adam Kirsch reviews C in Slate.

Details of the Hearing on the Activities of the International Necronautical Society
with Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley organised in NYC by Triple Canopy on 15 September.