Surplus Matter

Although McCarthy favours the emphasis on facts and visual description encouraged by Robbe-Grillet and achieves something of Kafka’s chill, C remains disappointingly approachable. It neither confounds nor excites; for better or worse, it is not a new direction. Serge, for all his affectlessness, still “casts his mind back” and even feels “excitement and desire growing in him”. Details carry symbolic freight; the author uses evocative devices such as onomatopoeia (the word “plash” appears three times). Robbe-Grillet said that the anti-bourgeois novel would not be able “to escape altogether” — but you might have expected Tom McCarthy, after all the rhetoric, to escape a little more than this.

Leo Robson reviews C in the New Statesman.

The ultimate aim of the necronaut, the INS manifesto says, is to construct ‘a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist’, with one example of such a craft being ‘the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual’. From this perspective, it’s not important whether or not McCarthy’s novel is reviewed well or badly, allowed to win the Booker or any other gong. Whatever happens to this novel or to this writer, a chain of events has been set in motion. Nothing and no one is going to stop it going on and on.

Jenny Turner reviews C in the London Review of Books.

There are passages that are very impressive: particularly some of the descriptions of flight, and one euphoric hymn to the wireless. But, though it is no doubt horribly middlebrow to say so, the deliberately flattened, almost mechanical characters (who, incidentally, speak like present-day art students) and the endless technical prose make for joyless reading.

Theo Tait reviews C in the Sunday Times.

Remainder established McCarthy as a contemporary champion of the experimental novel and heir to the postmodern stylists of the late 20th century, but it’s difficult to come up with a suitable thematic or stylistic precursor to his unclassifiably brilliant latest.

The influential American Publishers Weekly gives C a rave review.

Cold caplets covered Carrefax’s contraption crouched cannily… It is tempting to start in this way a review of C — the book eagerly anticipated by Tom McCarthy’s admirers for the last couple of years, which at one point was rumoured to contain only words beginning with the eponymous letter. Reader, it does not. Despite the proliferation of c-words, they are interspersed with others. The result is a heady — or, more aptly, captivating — concoction that constantly keeps you switched on. Far from being reduced to a word game, the text is spanned with verbal landmarks which make for a mock exercise in uniconsonantism the author clearly enjoys.

Anna Aslanyan reviews Tom McCarthy C in 3:AM Magazine.

Vancouver artist Lorna Brown’s art piece based on Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.

Hergé war als Künstler ein Genie, das ein ganz eigenes Genre begründet hat. Auch wenn wir heute noch nicht wissen, in welche Schublade wir ihn stecken sollen: Comiczeichner, Comicerzähler, auf jeden Fall ist er der Shakespeare dieser neuen Form. In der Geschichte von Tim in Tibet steckt zum Beispiel die endlos weiße Leere, in die Hergé in seinen Albträumen fiel, aus denen er schreiend erwachte. Wegen dieser Träume suchte er einen Psychoanalytiker auf und er zeigte seine Angst verschlüsselt als Schnee.

An in-depth interview with Tom McCarthy focusing on his Tintin book in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.

Roderik Six reviews the Dutch translation of Remainder on cultural website Cutting Edge.

Before seeing it I’d heard that it involved Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character staging an enormous “theatre event”, filling simulated rooms with actors simulating actions and this sounded shockingly like a conceit lifted straight from Tom McCarthy’s radical and brilliant novel Remainder. The real shock of watching the film, however, had nothing to do with such perceived borrowing — in its doublings, replications and simulacra the film is full of tropes seemingly pilfered from postmodern novels. What was really startling was that the presentation of those ideas was on a greater and more complex scale than these (apparent) literary antecedents.

Hermione Hoby on Charlie Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York.

Italian reviews of Remainder (Déjà-vu in Italian).