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.

[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.

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.

In pre-e-mail days, CC stood for the making of carbon copies, sheets that bore the imprint of a typed “original” document. Like that obsolete form of copying, McCarthy’s parroting of the avant-garde anti-novel bears the traces of its literary sources but fundamentally transforms them into a fascinatingly original work of fiction. Following its own maddening logic, it stages a marvelously sophisticated encounter with modernism’s own dead voices. When Zadie Smith praised McCarthy’s “Remainder” in a widely read 2007 essay in the New York Review of Books, she wondered what effect a contract with a commercial publisher might have on his future writing. Three years later, the answer is here, and the news is even better than anyone might have imagined.

Eric Banks reviews C in the Chicago Tribune.

The section set in London after the end of the Great War, when Serge enrols at the Architectural Association (he is an indifferent student, incapable of executing his sketches in anything other than plan view), contains some of the most straightforwardly descriptive prose in C. It’s all chorus girls and cocaine, and much of it wouldn’t be out of place in an altogether more familiar kind of historical novel — the kind of novel, in fact, that McCarthy isn’t remotely inter­ested in writing (though this portion of the book shows that he’s perfectly capable of doing so).

Jonathan Derbyshire reviews C in the Literary Review.

We associate the avant-garde with a paring back of authorial presumption, a subjectivity at odds with the vain omniscience of a Balzac or a Tolstoy. But C is a bird so rare as to seem oxymoronic: an avant-garde epic, the first I can think of since Ulysses, though Joyce’s boundless interiority could scarcely have less in common with McCarthy’s confrontation of what he has elsewhere termed the “brute materiality of the external world.” […] However openly he may fly the flags of his key influences, one has the distinct sensation while reading C that one has never read anything like it before; and it is pretty late in the game to be able to say that about anybody

Jonathan Dee reviews C in Harper’s Magazine.

If Remainder, as a title, suggests the mathematical, the psychoanalytic, the messianic, the word’s meaning in that novel is both more abstract and narrower — an excess of some kind that can’t be symbolically managed by narrative. In C, the theme surreptitiously returns, vastly broadened to the less controlled terrain of collective history. Remainders, here, are specters of technology, war, and empire, and if they come to Serge as a final, violent vision, his one life is ultimately unimportant to the book. He does not change. He merely dies, by stupid chance. What matters in C is history, for which there is no precise reenactment. It’s forever out of sync with itself, never to arrive at any kind of “rightness.”

Rachel Kushner reviews C in Bookforum.