Surplus Matter

“C” also argues for a destroying-to-create sort of writing. “The decorators — artists, scribes — had more freedom, more leeway to mix and match old texts, thereby creating new ones,” the research assistant explains. McCarthy orchestrates an almost incestuous intimacy among older texts and writers including “Oedipus Rex,” Cocteau’s “Orphée,” Nabokov’s “Ada,” the Bible, Joyce, Heidegger and Freud. The deaf children recite Chaucer and Ovid; Serge becomes obsessed with Hölderlin, firing his Verey gun in rhythmic patterns that match the poet’s syntax.

Meehan Crist reviews C in the Los Angeles Times.

Meaning, quite suddenly, is doubled, tripled. Scenes that were, on first take, merely finely crafted historical fictions are revealed to be the work of a mind entranced by refrains. Only the dullest of readers will be able to resist diving back into the text for a second look. Thoth, god of secret writing, is grafted on top of Serge’s own boyhood preoccupation with codes and communication; Alexander the Great stands in for Alexander Graham Bell; and the Rue des Soeurs in Cairo harks back to a name for heroin, “sister,” reminding us of Sophie, Serge’s beloved and doomed sibling. Culture gets recycled in this novel, but rather than bore us with each reappearance, it provides the dizzying thrill of familiarity.

Samantha Hunt reviews C in The Washington Post.

If, like Tom McCarthy, your debut novel (Remainder) was hailed as one of the decade’s best, and praised in The New York Times Book Review by both Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, the prospect of striking literary gold twice might seem daunting. Yet somehow, McCarthy managed to do just that with C, a heart-stomping work that tempers a Henry James creepiness with a Lawrence of Arabia moodiness.

Olivia Giovetti reviews C in Time Out New York.

He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of ­Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.

Jennifer Egan reviews C in the New York Times Book Review.

Mr. McCarthy has inserted Serge into what is essentially an old-fashioned story line set in the years before, during and after World War I. In theory this might be an interesting idea; after all, there is no reason that the realist and avant-garde traditions can’t cohabitate. But in this case it simply results in a historical narrative starring a bizarrely detached character with a forensic attitude toward life: someone who can’t feel any grief over his teenage sister’s sudden death and who sees soldiers getting tangled in their parachutes and thinks of wriggling “flies caught in spiders’ webs.”

Michiko Kakutani reviews C in the New York Times.

As to the novel’s title, there is a plethora of c-words: codes, calcium, catacomb, cyst, carbon (”the basic element of life”). And, Carrefax. What does it all add up to? It is hard to say, but there is an intrepid attitude to Mr. McCarthy’s literary sally that has little to do with pleasing publishers or even an audience. “C” is clever, confident, coy—and cryptic.

Alexander Theroux reviews C for the Wall Street Journal.

The word “experimental” to describe this densely, exultantly imaginative book is being bandied about with great abandon, and it is not only misleading but also wrong. Beckett’s prose work is experimental, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is, the novels of BS Johnson are, Pale Fire makes the grade, as does Kelman’s Translated Accounts; the defining feature of a truly experimental work is its form. While C is unquestionably brilliant, usefully denting the model of the psychological realism that is the dominant mode of our conservative times by its unique, disorientating glance at Modernism, it is less experimental than its predecessor, Remainder, or any of the novels mentioned above. It takes no risks with form and structure, using the realist frame for its own subversive purposes. Instead, it’s the constant ripple of subterranean correspondences, the whispery yet omnipresent symphony of codes and signals that provides the matrix of the book, that kinks it into a new thing.

Neel Mukherjee rave reviews C in The Times.

The near-Joycean scale and density of all this is truly impressive, as is McCarthy’s ability to fold it into a cleanly constructed narrative, which has its boring stretches but also moments of humour and weird beauty. Yet its mind-blowingness as a reading experience depends on the reader’s appetite for certain types of analysis. Armed with various concepts from Heidegger, Freud or Paul Virilio, say, it would be possible to unpick its implications more or less indefinitely, but there’s a dispiriting feeling that the book has been reverse-engineered with an eye to achieving just that. On the other hand, Sophie’s death, which is partly an allegory for lost philosophical certainties, can also be read as taking on an emotional weight that goes against the grain of the novel’s ostensible scorn for squishy psychologising. “Will he turn out,” McCarthy asked recently of the French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, “to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalising literary deconstruction?” It’s a sign of his writerly horse sense that this skilfully realised, ambitious, over-literary book finds the time to leave a similar question hanging.

Christopher Tayler reviews C in the Guardian.

The book fairly thrums with insects, incest, geometry, spiritualism, maps, coordinates, the invention and evolution of radio, aeroplanes, codes, weapons, and object-detection systems. If Kafka, according to Zizek, eroticized bureaucracy, McCarthy “eroticizes technology” he sexes “things” up.

Steve Finbow reviews C for Bookmunch.

It is not difficult to imagine C as a video art installation, playing recognizable footage, but at the wrong speed, with the composition somehow askew.

Ben Jeffery reviews C in the Times Literary Supplement.