Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Vintage 2007. 304 Pages. $13.95.
Reviewed by Jon Baskin
12.5.06
One way to describe the difference between life and art would be to say that in art there are no accidents, whereas in life, there are nothing but accidents. The anonymous narrator in Tom McCarthy’s remarkably sophisticated debut novel, Remainder, has been in an accident. About the accident he can say “very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits.” Recovered physically but clearly not emotionally, the trauma victim sits in his London flat, “doing nothing” and waiting for his “settlement” to come through.
The settlement has been promoted to the trauma victim as “a future strong enough to counterbalance my no-past, a moment that would make me better, whole, complete.” When he can’t walk, the nurses say the settlement will put him “back on [his] feet.” Similarly, in the eyes of the law the settlement is the manner in which the trauma victim’s case will be settled, ended. Whoever is responsible for the accident will pay and the victim will move on. But for the victim, the word settlement conjures an entirely different vision. He thinks of “remote settlements in ancient times, village outposts crouching beneath hostile skies [ . . . and] of people—dancers, maybe, or soldiers—crouching, set, waiting for things to start.” The trauma victim’s 8 ½ million pound “settlement” is the beginning of his story not its end.
This sort of wordplay—this echoing, this “remaindering” of meaning—is typical of the novel. When the narrator describes a cab office near his apartment imprinted with the words “Movement Cars, Airports, Stations, Light, Removals, Any Distance,” readers can be confident that every single one of these words will eventually matter (and they do). The exact figure of the settlement—the “perfect” eight and the messy 1/2, a “shard of detritus” like the loose bone fragment rattling around in the trauma victim’s knee—also grow in significance as the novel progresses. Like one of Freud’s neurotic case studies, the trauma victim packs his narration with subconscious recollections; what seems random or incidental is later revealed to be of the greatest importance.
The driving question of the novel’s first act is what the trauma victim should do with his money. He wants it to solve his primary affliction since the accident, which he describes as a feeling of “fakeness.” Having been injured so badly he had to relearn “how to move,” the trauma victim has had to break down every movement into parts. “Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated,” he explains. “There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward.” The process has created an “eternal detour” between the trauma victim and his actions. Every movement, he feels, is contrived or “inauthentic.” He is nostalgic for a time before the accident when he felt natural, or, as he calls it, “real.” Watching Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets, he reflects on the naturalness of the actor’s performance: “Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between.”
How the trauma victim spends his money is connected to his admiration for DeNiro and represents, fundamentally, a breakdown of respect for the boundary lines between art and life. He gets the idea while standing listlessly in a friend’s bathroom, staring at a crack in the wallpaper. The crack instigates a half-remembered vision of a cracked bathroom wall in a Parisian-style apartment building, the smell of liver wafting through the window from a flat downstairs, the sound of Rachmaninov on a piano. “Most of all what I remembered was this,” the trauma victim thinks, “That inside this remembered building . . . all my movements had been fluent and unforced.” The trauma victim resolves to use his money to “re-enact” his vision from the bathroom, purchasing a building in Brixton, refurbishing it according to his specifications, and contracting actors to play the characters he has imagined.
This scenario is a twist on the traditional existential crisis narrative, typified by Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea or Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, where antiheroes Antoine Roquentin and Binx Bolling throw up their hands at the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. Like Antoine and Binx, the trauma victim has lost his grip on what he means in the world. Unlike them, he actively seeks a solution by creating meaning for himself. The re-enactment, where everything is “zinging with significance,” represents the world in which the trauma victim wishes he lived, a world like a film, where everything means something. Obsessed with a craving for authenticity, the trauma victim commissions other re-enactments, of concrete events and finally of fully fictional scenes. Soon, he has hundreds of people working to satisfy his tyrannical specifications, which grow more and more elaborate and, finally, destructive.
Ultimately, McCarthy means to say something not just about his narrator’s peculiar project, but about the artistic process itself. The trauma victim, after all, engages in a kind of universal artistic fantasy, that of imposing one’s imagination on real space. His folly is to think he can eliminate contingency altogether. Despite his careful planning, his re-enactments are repeatedly thrown off by “interference and distortion”—by accidents. McCarthy suggests we fool ourselves when we forget that any simulation, artistic or otherwise, represents an attempt to impose meaning on the meaningless. It is precisely because "accidents happen" that art can never truly imitate life. Thankfully, however, McCarthy’s reservations about the artistic process did not dissuade him from creating this exceptional first novel, which represents one excellently crafted deception.
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