Everybody wants something new.
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder follows a man who receives a large sum of money following an accident that caused him to enter a coma. He decides to invest some of his money into speculative markets, particularly tech and telecommunications, and with the rest of his settlement, he begins reenacting memories and events of his own life to recreate the experience of them.
Made famous by a Zadie Smith essay in NYRB, McCarthy’s novel reacts to and is about the process of art creation (not a brand new concern exactly), and satirizes the Victorian novel of manners, and the Proustian novel of memories. It is also often quite fun.
He describes, post-coma, relearning the many basic tasks of being alive. The unnamed narrator first recounts eating a carrot: “every action is complex operation, a system.” When one breaks down the world into its essence, the grams of matter, the nodes of feeling, a system remains. The leftovers, the forgotten automations of our everyday provide our world its life and blood. If one was to consciously control the regulated processes of breathing, or of pumping blood through the heart, would we have time to enjoy things? To make music?
The simple answer is no. Our narrator sets to find out. He wants honesty in the movements of humans, on De Niro’s performance in Mean Streets, he argues “every movement he made, each gesture, was perfect, seamless.” Eventually the desire for a seamless world leads him to performing events of real life.
The reenactments are staged by actors and sometimes real people with perfect precision organized by a man named Naz. He chooses to recreate why not live? Why recreate the things of the past, gather them up and make them viewable, perhaps artificial?
A long passage early in the novel might provide answers. Our narrator has a three to four-page dinner with a homeless person that he meets outside his banker’s office. They discuss the homeless man’s life and journey to London from Luton, the dog he keeps with him and why our narrator might be interested in talking to him. Then, at the chapter’s end, he tells us “the truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person.” This slippage could be frustrating, a simple misdirection like a dream sequence, but it is in the next chapter, in dialogue with someone else the pieces connect.
“‘You been giving birth in there?’ the man who told [him] to hurry up asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Giving birth. Is that what took you so long?’”
Our narrator spends a long time in a bathroom at a party holding up the line staring at a crack in the wall that makes him recall sense memories and events in a nameless apartment. Usually, a person occupying the party bathroom this long at least has drugs. Not here. He stares and eventually draws the wallpaper mark to take with him. Trying to recreate this memory, to reenact the events and control (perhaps, manage) the feelings that previously arose in him. Here is his first enactment.
McCarthy uses this as an obvious allegory for Proustian or autofictional novels. Memory structures these novels, a possibly solipsistic practice or one plunging the depths of society itself through the individual. The slant from McCarthy comes from the narrator’s desire to refract and recontrol the memories, to take the event (about the actual occurrence we know next to nothing) and recreate it. Earlier, a woman laments the “Victorian model” of non-profits that is “self-perpetuating,” a clear dig at Victorian novels of manners which rely on both bourgeois cultural norms and tastes to remain in vogue. Those norms, unlike memories perhaps, are an ever moving target. Memory isn’t stable per se but it is often singular, or individual. For all that’s made of a collective memory, it might be said that formation is more institutional than properly collective.
The act of recreation, of making something real from nothing turns out “more complicated than [he] thought.” He imagines a whole world, but first he must “buy a whole building and fill it with people who behave just as [he tells] them to.” A piece of art is born. Something like a staged play, but a staged play of his life happens from here over and over with near perfect accuracy. To arrive at the smell of liver, the right smell, eight cast iron pans fry liver in mounds of fat and oil. A piano player repeats the same piece over and over, making mistakes at intervals to appear like learning. A motorcyclist dismantles and rebuilds his bike continuously.
Remainder continues in the autofictional mode from there. Its emphasis on reenactments from our narrator’s life tests the limits of fictionalized reality and proceeds to take it to its logical conclusion. That dialogue from the bathroom scene (“‘you been giving birth in there?’”) can be taken literally at first to be a jokey hyperbole and funny bit of banter, but in fact our narrator was giving artistic birth in the bathroom. The challenge to a Victorian novel was always initially going to be voice, a singular speech up against sweeping cultural representationalism. How does one then challenge the voice?
Later, on his way home, he witnesses a shoot out between three black men. One on a bicycle dies. He tells Naz he wishes to recreate the event.
He takes his car to the shop. The mechanics evaluate his car; not much wrong save for an empty washer fluid reservoir. The car turns on. Our narrator is covered in washer fluid, perhaps divine intervention, “a miracle of transubstantiation,” but definitely a “triumph over matter.”
The recreation of the black man’s death recalls the conversation fake-out with the homeless man from Luton. What is true experience? Our narrator has the money to do whatever he wants but does he feel it? Can a novel be a true experience and make the reader feel the character’s feelings or is there always necessarily a distance created in the act of reading?
A novel perhaps is a bad example. Our narrator isn’t really writing he’s staging plays. The distance between an audience and an actor is smaller than on the page. At a viewing of Hamlet, the audience is in Denmark; reading Pride & Prejudice, the reader is on the couch. A novel necessarily abstracts from the world, moves the reader away, dragging or guiding them through a fiction. It can never be true experience because everything must be heightened, exaggerated, unnatural.
The mediation between viewer or reader and art will always be false. Breaking the fourth wall offers a nice trick, but even that can be placed within the acceptable limits of the stage. The feelings arisen by art are not natural, they’re fabricated as a result of the art. Only in living can one hope to arrive at true experience.
In the end, the reenactments aren’t enough for the narrator, and he constructs a real bank robbery without telling anyone which results in two people’s deaths. He reacts to a police pursuit by demanding his pilot fly in a figure-eight or infinity symbol indefinitely. The creation of something can proceed indefinitely. One can remake and remake and remake the world infinitely; we are perhaps always and forever recreating the world as soon as we step outside. That’s a heavy responsibility, one that might require some training.
Everybody wants something new.
“You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact, it’s made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one small system. Articulated.”
Our narrator thinks of the process of moving people through space as an artistic adventure, and the escalator and a self-perpetuating, circular “looped” machine as an exemplar of his ideal. Of course, the “loads of individual, separate steps” is the novel, Remainder, which becomes the interlocking repetitions of several different absurdist events that occur simultaneously financed by and at the behest of our narrator.
It’s worth remembering that the narrator was hit on the head preceding the events of the book and there’s one initial reading of the entire novel that relies on narratives of trauma. A trauma narrative (either the psychotherapeutic or medical kind) would argue the narrator experienced a defining event (large, hard objects hitting his head as he walked about) which thus distorted his reality either biologically or psychologically. Coupled with nearly infinite funds, his trauma allowed him to take maniacal control of the world. The processing of the events in the novel, then from this reading, becomes a compulsion and symptom of disease in need of correction. Indeed, Naz attempts on multiple occasions to have a doctor intervene. Our narrator spends several days “drifting in and out of trances,” what he calls “walking comas.”
The doctor gives credence to a traumatic reading of events saying he’s manifesting the “‘autonomic symptoms of trauma: masked facies, decreased eye blink, cogwheel rigidity, postural reflexion, mydriasis…’” The highly technical physical symptoms and jargon distort the world rather than clarify by refracting them up against technical language and reality, such as it exists. At one moment these are the correct diagnoses of a professional and at another, they are the simple ramblings of a person in power, someone who can stop all the reenactments, who can slow down the process of art making with his jargon. “Masked facies” at a quick glance might appear to be “masked faces,” but is actually a symptom commonly associated with Parkinson’s characterized by an extreme expressionlessness. A lack of true experience or feeling one might say.
The visual distortion of “masked facies” then develops new resonance even as it matches the reader’s own misunderstanding of the terms. “Masked facies” works to distance the symptom and its fears from the patient, the doctor, and the interlocutors (in this case the readers and Naz). The distance could be shrunk with something more colloquial and well understood, but thematically, McCarthy uses terms like these to further emphasize the logistical distance in art making. It’s not even clear the doctor understands what the term is since it begins a list of similarly vexing terminology—McCarthy is the one invoking this term through his character, who is little more than a mouthpiece of medical diagnoses. In being spoken by the doctor and not reported by our narrator, McCarthy imbues the words with institutional meaning and knowledge. The reader trusts that the character knows what the words mean, their possible origins (other than the brain injury), and what is to be done about them. When pressed by Naz, the doctor replies all of the symptoms suggest “catecholamine depletion in the central nervous system. Plus, a high level of opioids.” The doctor back peddles that our narrator may not be taking drugs, just experiencing some “endogenous” pleasures similar to them. Endogenous pleasures don’t sound as menacing as Parkinson’s.
But to inject life into the real world from memory requires reality to be more expressive, more elevated. Perhaps, it would require more sensuality than a bourgeois novel, could offer. Re-creation of true feelings requires more than one person, much like telling someone a memory doesn’t then inject them with representational feelings—only through a tightening and deepening of narrative can honest reaction occur.
A sort of dullness permeates the novel, only broken by the violent shooting of a black man because the man is a “symbol of perfection.” The racialized other’s death represents the first true, unadorned experience possible. He goes on, “all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.” Said another way, all great enterprises are about managerial skill, a professional class proficiency.
I don’t want to over rely on a direct reading of McCarthy’s novel as his own feelings about the Victorian or the Proustian novels. He founded a philosophical society called The International Necronautical Society (INS) that are “modern lovers of debris.” They love the leftovers, the remainders, the solid bits and pieces of life left behind by those too self-involved with transcendence or euphoria to see their truth. Smith, in her NYRB essay, discusses their philosophy at some length.
However, McCarthy’s parallel activities offer at least some support for an idea of what’s going on in his debut. What is more debris laden than the ways in which human beings repeat themselves? We tell the same stories, we clock in and clock out of work, we buy the same things, we ignore the same things every day, we fixate on bits of life large and small. What is more debris and surplus filled, yet desiring of no frills, all protein, than the process of logistics? The challenge of McCarthy’s novel then is not for The New but for the Already There—what did we miss while we had our preoccupations?
The concept of management and logistics might bisect the Victorian novel of deep aesthetic feeling and the autofictional novel of psychology. These novels suppose those things as real but Remainder suggests debris, leftovers are instead. During the climactic bank robbery scene, one of the hired actors quivers in italics, “it’s real!” Reality however, is perhaps not a property of the world itself, it is a condition of the person observing the world—is the bank robbery real? The actor seems to think so. However, our narrator, screams “money, blood, and light!” on seeing a shot corpse, suggesting realness is about the end of fantasy; the ability to choose the ugly, nasty, and violent over the memorial or even, the sublime.
I love this book so much - reread it for the first time in 15ish years this summer and i think it blew me away even more this time. Haven’t read his two novels following this one, but the one from a couple years ago (The Making of Incarnation) is similarly (but maybe not as singlemindedly) obsessed/fixated on the minutiae of human behavior as a plot device in a much different way, almost a pynchonian pseudo-caper. Very much looking forward to diving into the ones I skipped.
Some of what Nathan Fielder is exploring through a comedic lens on “The Rehearsal” on HBO is certainly in dialogue with your insights about McCarthy’s novel. Thoroughly enjoyed reading!