scotchneat.ca

Disclosure: I was asked by the publisher to review this book. Review is my own, though.

It’s there in a moment when you make a small gesture, or stop on a street, and there is a feeling that you can only describe as connective or big or full. This is what Remainder is about. Kinda.

The book comes with reviews about its dark humour, commentary on modern life. TSL quite liked it.

In it, we meet a man who is hit by an unidentified flying object, owned, one presumes, by a multinational. Anyway, he loses his memory of the “incident” and is given a handsome “settlement” to keep it that way.

And then he goes about spending the money on a series of “re-enactments” that go from an entire apartment house and an old lady bending over to put down the garbage to a series of local crimes.

What this book was most about for me was art. Art in a moment and layers of artifice that force you to think about how reproduction is perhaps as artful as the original. I “got” the character, and the sense of his growing need to capture the thrill of perfect reproduction, getting rid of “the surplus matter” (87). In the author’s world, this amounts to bringing together entire casts of people, and eventually, real blood (but say no more there, cuz you need something to wonder about).

What I liked most: the little moments of description where the author captures precisely the kind of internal loops that we’ve all experienced, such as when he’s on the way to the airport to pick up a friend and realizes he forgot the flight information:

I turned back again, but stopped immediately as it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need the information: I could just look at the arrivals board and see which flight was coming from Harare. … I turned back out and was about to start walking onwards when it struck me that I didn’t know which terminal to go to. … I turned round yet again. Two men who’d walked out of a cafe net to the tyre shop were looking at me. I realized that i was jerking back and forth like paused video images do on low-quality machines. (13)

It seems like a quotidien passage to pick, but I think McCarthy has an ear (eye?) for the jetsam of the human mind that reminds me a bit of Don DeLillo. That austere and somehow darkly funny insight of how the mind goes, that we can all recognize in ourselves. All the more alarming when it plays out the way it does. The passages where he describes what rehab is like become the internal workings of his pet projects: break everything down to its constituent parts and then execute them (well, maybe literally, even).

What I didn’t like: The ending was suave and in keeping with the character but somehow disappointing (like a clean-up Hollywood writer stepped in and did some ghost-writing somehow). I almost would have liked something more visceral–since much of the voice of the book is so sterile, the shock of more, um, “squelchy” language might have been interesting.

All in all, the consistency of voice is quite mature, forcefully quiet and sustained for a debut novel. The humour, such as it is, will definitely be in the ear of the reader, who may issue a snort but never a chuckle. I wouldn’t recommend it to my Dad, but I might recommend it to my M.A. friends…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 2:16 am and is filed under Books, Images & ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.