RSSREMAINDER
By Tom McCarthy
308 pages. Vintage Books. $13.95
The unnamed narrator of Tom McCarthy’s first novel has been in an accident, the details of which he can’t remember. Even if he could, at the book’s start he is paid £8.5 million in a Settlement with a Clause (the capitals are Mr. McCarthy’s) that bars him from talking about the event. With the money, he seeks to heal himself of a lingering sense of distance and detachment by staging re-enactments of events somehow connected to his life. “They’d all had the same goal, their only goal: to allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us — and nothing separating me from the experience that I was having,” writes Mr. McCarthy. The book originally was published in a print run of 750 by a small French publishing house; it is being published here as a paperback original.