Keir Wilmut

The nice people at Raincoast Books sent me a copy of Remainder, and asked if I’d review it.

What remains of a person after a near-fatal trauma? What does it mean to be authentic? These are two of the questions posed by Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder.

The book begins with an unnamed narrator completing his recovery from a traumatic accident. At some point prior to the events of the novel, he was badly injured by an… object that fell from the sky. More than that, we never learn – in part because he cannot fully remember the incident, and in part because of a confidentiality clause he signed in exchange for a healthy £8.5 million settlement (hooray for lawyers!).

It is quickly apparent, though, that while he may have physically recovered, he still harbor deep mental wounds. After the trauma, and spending months in a coma and months in physiotherapy, he has lost the ability to simply be natural, to not have to actively think of how to be and how to engage with the world.

It’s like when you first learned to drive, and you had to consciously think, “step down on clutch pedal, move gear shift upwards to the left, now slowly raise clutch while pushing down gas pedal.” It was all very forced and artificial and jerky. After awhile, though, these artificial motions embed themselves in your subconscious, and you could drive without having to think about pushing pedals and pulling levers.

The narrator lives his life like a beginner driver: he can’t move past the jerky learning stage to a point where he can just be. Everything has the flavor of artifice.

A seemingly trivial incident at a party pushes him out of this floating state, if only for a moment. As he stands in the washroom he observes a long crack that threads its way along the wall. As he stares at it, he is suddenly consumed by a sharp memory of an almost completely forgotten moment from his past, a memory of a time when he had “been real – been without first understanding how to try to be.”

Desperate to hold onto this feeling, he copies down the crack, and begins an obsessive quest to recreate this fragment of a memory. He buys a building, renovates it to match his memory, and hires actors to obsessively recreate the moment – a man playing piano, an old woman lifting her shopping bags in the hall, someone frying liver, cats on the adjacent roof. By living in this moment, he is able to achieve – just for a moment – the forgotten sense of spontaneous being.

The feeling, of course, does not last. The narrator is driven to create more recreations, and even recreations of recreations. The blur between reality and fantasy begin to blur; he begins to slip into trances, and there are indications that some characters may not exist.

Remainder has been getting rave reviews in Europe, where it was first published, and in North America. But I can’t escape the feeling that part of critical love-in may be because of the difficulty McCarthy had in publishing it. After virtually every major UK publishing house rejected it, a quirky French publisher finally took in on, albeit in a tiny run of just 750 copies. Once in print, it received enough good word of mouth that larger publishing houses released it.

There is, I think, something in us that likes it when big companies are proven wrong like this – Corporate Publisher Rejects Quality! is a good story. It shows that they don’t really get it like we do! A similar thing happened with Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: after their major label rejected the twangy symphony of static and noise as “unreleasable,” critics rushed to declare it a seminar work of genius that showed how out of touch Corporate Music was with True Art. I like the album a lot, but I think some of the critical lauding was driven by a desire to show just how dumb those Suits were to reject it.

I see something similar going on with Remainder. It’s a good book: McCarthy plays with issues of nihilism and reality, and manages to get the reader to almost view as normal the narrator’s increasingly bizarre world of recreations. The theme of authenticity is interesting, and the novel pulls at a lot of literary and philosophical strands of what it is to be real, what it means to be authentic.

But it isn’t a great book. While the prose is presumably deliberately flat, it doesn’t make for the most engaging of reads. The obsessive recreations get somewhat tedious. While this may be intended, it stalls the narrative a number of times. The final recreation jars with the rest of the novel, and feels forced. Ultimately, McCarthy presents a number of interesting ideas, and pulls at strands, but isn’t ultimately able to provide any answers or give the reader much of a better understanding of the themes. Or maybe it was just all too deep for me.