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Remainder

Tom McCarthy

3.66 · Rating details · 6,568 ratings · 880 reviews

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.

Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.

How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in rece ...more

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Paperback, 308 pages

Published February 13th 2007 by Vintage (first published 2005)

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Apr 03, 2017 Sean Barrs rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Those who enjoy watching paint dry and thinking about cracks in walls.

Shelves: 1-star-reads, contemporary-lit

I almost never, ever, give up on books. Even when I’m reading the ones I dislike, I make an effort to reach the end. I don’t think you can fully judge a book unless you’ve read it in its entirety. It would be like a movie reviewer walking out of the cinema half way through and writing up a review for the film nevertheless. It would be incomplete. But this one defeated me. I just couldn’t go on after hitting the half way mark. It’s only the second book during the last four years of reading that I ...more

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Jun 23, 2012 Greg rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

Zadie Smith praised this book and in her essay on 'realistic' versus whatever you want to call this sort of novel. I'm sure she is smarter than I am and she maybe knows more about literature, but I don't share her enthusiasm for this and I think that there are many better examples of books out there fighting the good fight against the naturalistic / realistic novel. But maybe this is the sort of novel that can serve as a gateway read into the more interesting terrain of 'difficult' literature (o Zadie Smith praised this book and in her essay on 'realistic' versus whatever you want to call this sort of novel. I'm sure she is smarter than I am and she maybe knows more about literature, but I don't share her enthusiasm for this and I think that there are many better examples of books out there fighting the good fight against the naturalistic / realistic novel. But maybe this is the sort of novel that can serve as a gateway read into the more interesting terrain of 'difficult' literature (or post-modern, or whatever term you want to use, I'm lately fond of difficult).

It's not that I hated the book or anything. I enjoyed it, but nothing about it ever really won me over either. The writing is sort of autistic in the same way that Don Delillo tends to be sometimes and I had no problem with that. McCarthy never got the words to sing though the way that Delillo does with his overly stylized and flat prose.

My major problem was that this novel was a one-trick show and even with attempts at suspending my judgment and letting the novel play by its own rules I just couldn't get over how monumentally immature the main idea in this novel is.

The main character, the narrator, suffers a severe injury when something falls on his head. Afterwards he is awarded a very large cash settlement that he uses to fund re-enactments of events. His first reenactment is trying to capture a memory he has of an apartment building, so he goes about rebuilding this scene right down to the cracks in the walls and populates the building with a host of people who have to do small tasks over and over again, being a living loop of this particular memory of his. Behind all of this the narrator is trying to capture a more authentic experience, a hyper-reality. He continues doing this with various sorts of events. Crime scenes, getting a tired changed, among the ones he actually carries out along with future possibilities of little moments that he feels will be worth re-enacting.

As a premise I think this is interesting, but it doesn't go anywhere beyond the thrill the narrator has at 'perfecting' reality by replaying an event with actors over and over again until all the messiness of real life has been ironed out of it and the event becomes 'authentic'.

This is the sort of Orwellian 2+2=5 that certain strains of post-modernism love to play around with. But just because you say it doesn't make it true. If there were any kind of critique or judgment played out anywhere in this book I'd probably have enjoyed it more, but as the narrator falls deeper and deeper in to his 'unreal' real there is no sign given that the reader should be extrapolating anything other than a Baudrillard sort of nonsense about the nature of reality in our 'post-modern' age. Real life can be alienating and inauthentic, but it's only more alienating and even more inauthentic if you wrap up your view of the world with cutesy paradoxes and empty ramblings of dead French theorists.

Maybe I'm not giving the book enough credit though and there is some critique hiding somewhere here. Maybe a book doesn't need critique, and I agree, not every book does, but maybe I would have liked to see more movement in the main character, or have him off-set with another character. All of the other people who populate this book are enablers who go along with helping him create his view of the world. Yeah, they are basically all being paid by him, but still they are the people who create this growing unreality for him.

Maybe I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to think of his novel. Should I instead be reading this whole novel as a look at the absurdity of this guy who has been damaged by a big corporation and now is retreating from the real world to a safe place where he can just relive an event at a time without the possibility of real life dropping some potentially lethal shit on his head?

Or maybe it was just that the concept of authentic kept coming up, and this works as a code word to me for things to avoid. Generally as soon as someone starts using the word authentic I get the feeling that they are going to tell you exactly what you should do and be and any deviation will make you inauthentic.

Or maybe I'm just a little turned off by the way the novel veers towards the end, and knowing sort of where Tom McCarthy falls in his philosophical allegiances I can't help but see a Slavoj Zizek sort of figure masturbating furiously to images and thoughts of impersonal violence and salivating about how he can turn this fetishistic voyeurism into a new 'radical' theory.

But most likely I'm just annoyed at the basic ideas of the novel, and see too much of my own navel-gazing that I took for profundity and I'm holding it to the same standard that I hold my old self to, yeah, interesting idea but now do something with it. And maybe I just see too many parallels in the trajectory of some of my own thinking and see them both ending in horrific violence and I'm a bit bewildered how it can be seen as anything beautiful or authentic. Or is the reader supposed to make this sort of mental leap themselves? I don't know. Maybe I just missed a nudge or some sign that would have put this into a better context for me.

If you don't want to get hung up on the stuff that I get hung up on, this isn't a bad book at all. I don't think it's a great book, and as I said up near the top of the review I think there are better books of his sort of thing out there. But as a gateway sort of novel into the land of DFW and Gaddis and all of those sorts this could be good. It just doesn't go far enough or do much beyond it's one basic idea and if you don't have an aversion to the idea you just might enjoy this. If the word Baudrillard gives you hives though you might want to skip this. ...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Szplug rated it really liked it

In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve.
–Franz Kafka

In his first (published) novel, I am convinced that Tom McCarthy realized his beguilingly strange fictive vision within a degree of perfection. In a skillfully wrought authorial mirroring, every element begets that which renders it contingent—the everyman narrative voice, the unadorned prose, the detached inflection and intonation, the hum of the banal and drone of the workaday, the subdued sexuality, the repetit ...more

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Sep 13, 2010 Drew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Rarely does a book manage to break down the habits and expectations that a reader builds up in a lifetime of reading.
Novels conform to schemas: there are quests, there are obstacles to be overcome, there are the universal standbys of love, hate, sex and murder: death must come violently and suddenly in order to grip the reader and to disentangle her from the nasty feeling that it might be her destiny too one day.
Of course these are broad and possibly unfair generalisations, but you get the poin Rarely does a book manage to break down the habits and expectations that a reader builds up in a lifetime of reading.
Novels conform to schemas: there are quests, there are obstacles to be overcome, there are the universal standbys of love, hate, sex and murder: death must come violently and suddenly in order to grip the reader and to disentangle her from the nasty feeling that it might be her destiny too one day.
Of course these are broad and possibly unfair generalisations, but you get the point: the reservoir of storytelling is limited, and most authors are quite happy to wallow in the same shallows that their forebears found so reassuring. True, the 20th century saw some brave and sometimes foolhardy attempts to punt out into uncharted waters - the French nouvelle roman is perhaps the most prominent example of this - but today we are back to compendiousness, narrative and the Jonathan Franzens of this world: wise witty wordsmiths whose pat answers and worldly patter is carefully weighed against liberal Doubts and Cultured Concern as to the Future of the World.
And then along comes Tom McCarthy. A writer whose books (all right, call them novels if you must) record the bravest moments of Robbe-Grillet, but make it all look so effortless and at the same time manage to entertain to the extent that you want to slap him on the back and buy him a pint.
So what does happen in Remainder? Not very much, and when it does, it gets repeated time after time after time. Not exactly a recipe for success, you might think. But McCarthy's style is so casual, so insouciant, so offhand, that everything comes across as a paradox and a poser, as if there were a novel behind the novel, a story behind the story.
But what could be behind it though? This is the question that occupied me in the first few run-throughs: who is his model? Is it Sartre, or perhaps Kirkegaard, or is it more contemporary, perhaps Ballard? This last option comes closest to the truth: McCarthy's protagonist in Remainder is the victim of an unexplained accident; he obsesses over memories that he believes can lead to insights if re-enacted, and when these actually are re-enacted he falls into fugues and trances that are reminiscent of the catatonic states in which so many Ballard characters spend their happiest hours.
In this way the book is tinged with the atmosphere of both Vermilion Sands and Crash. The private, psychological, obsessive nature of the book all speak for a Ballardian inheritance, as does the book's later phase in which the scene moves to an abandoned airport hangar near Heathrow, a Ballardian location if ever there was one.
What speaks against it though is the language, the attitude. Unlike Ballard, McCarthy writes in a modern, idiomatic, demotic style. For anyone who has lived in - or even spent time in - London, the tone and overall slant of the protagonists blank, hacked-off impassivity will be familiar, if not welcome. (A brief aside: this is a London novel with a London attitude that is so far removed from the flavourless word-strudel of The Finkler Question, that I feel inclined to suggest that Howard Jacobson should take the time to read his younger contemporary's effort - and learn.)
The city pervades and invades every aspect of the book: places are always described with the utmost accuracy, whether Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, a bank in Chiswick or a lawyer's office in Islington. But more than geography, it's about texture: the brick dust, chewing gum, tarry oil and generic filth that defines the urban environment: a world of tawdry minutiae in which the protagonist loses himself and temporarily escapes the apparent meaninglessness of his existence.
It seems that the more I write the more there is to say with this book. Because I haven't even started describing the actual story, if that's a meaningful label for what happens here.
What does happen is a curious set of events that begins with something unexplained falling from the sky. This object injures the novels protagonist so severely that he spends several months in hospital: initially comatose, then without the use of his limbs, and eventually in the hands of a physiotherapist who re-teaches him basic movements, from holding objects to eating and finally walking. This is related in flashback on the day when "the settlement", a payment of eight million pounds from whoever let the unknown object fall on our hero, arrives.
After overcoming the initial shock of receiving such a massive payout, he wonders what to do with the money and rejects his friend Dave's hedonism - sniff cocaine of the back of the best-looking prostitute you can find until the money runs out - and his not-quite girlfriend Caroline's altruistic suggestion that he donate the money to a charity in Africa. In fact he has very little idea of what to do until he goes to a party and discovers a crack in the bathroom wall that triggers a set of previously concealed memories. In these memories he lives at the top of a block in a flat that also has a bathroom with a similar crack in the wall, sick but living plants in the hallway and a rear window view of a courtyard where black cats stalk languidly over red rooftops while in the flat below an elderly woman fries liver and in the flat below hers a melancholy pianist practices all day long. Other details also emerge: a motorbike freak who spends hours in the yard tinkering with his machine and a concierge who is present but quite static.
In the midst of this memory is another: the memory of moving through the flat completely at ease in the world: he remembers gliding through the rooms like a dancer, without even thinking about his movements, opening the fridge in a fluid, lyrical movement and not having to think about what he was doing.
Of course this plays with the reader's expectations on several levels: is this a psychological problem, a philosophical problem or rather something in the aesthetic realm? All three ideas are handsomely treated, though none is finally excused. We are kept in suspense between the various possibilities, with connotations, cultural cross-references and symbolically loaded reverberations whizzing around the echo-chamber of Mr. McCarthy's wonderful machine.
I could go on now, but I haven't got the time. It's a wonderful book. More later... ...more

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Feb 07, 2008 Mattie rated it it was amazing

Fascinating, disturbing, strange, compelling. To actually write about Remainder would, I fear, spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it. Even to list the variety of questions swarming around in my head seems like it could ruin it. So, I won't. I'll just say that this book is unlike anything else I've read and I loved it. I suspect this is going to haunt me for a while. Which is cool. ...more

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Jun 25, 2008 Laryssa Wirstiuk rated it it was ok

Finally, I finished reading Remainder by Tom McCarthy. I have been reading this 300-something page book, which I purchased based on a recommendation from McSweeney’s, for weeks. Today, I willed myself to finish it.

My professors at the University of Maryland, Merrill Feitell and Maud Casey, constantly discuss the importance of the first fifty pages of a book. They believe that these introductory pages can make or break a novel.

When Victor LaValle spoke to our workshop, he recalled what it had bee ...more

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Oct 05, 2007 Katia rated it really liked it

I had to give this book four stars although I can not recommend it. It really drew me in. I couldn't put it down but then as I went on, it became more and more disturbing until it got just outright creepy. This book is so intricate and well-written. I think it will stay with me for a long time, but I don't really want it to. I was SO creeped out by the end of it, I actually felt anxious for several days after finishing it. It affected the way I looked at things around me, the details that you wo ...more

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Aug 04, 2007 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: everyone!

I *loved* this book, but probably because it has exactly the ingredients I like: "unreliable" narrator, sharp writing, and a page-turning plot -- so hard to find all of these in one book!

I thought the premise was moderately interesting, but it's not what captured me. Rather, it was the way the book spun out and the narrator unraveled that fascinated me. And Tom McCarthy is just smart and witty, and his prose is razor-sharp. Reading the other reviews on this site of this book, I was genuinely sur ...more

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Sep 10, 2010 Mary rated it it was amazing

Flawless. A taut, tidy, disturbing little piece of fiction, and one that certainly won't be for everyone. A novel that should have been stifling and airless somehow manages to feel aerated and cautiously expansive, like an inflating balloon on the verge of bursting.

This isn't the sort of book for readers in the mood for something filled with likable characters or lyrical emoting. I love those books, but Remainder is not one of them--it isn't for the heart, it's for the head. It is a thought exp ...more

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Oct 06, 2007 R. marked it as to-read

Me and a friend each received promo copies of this...as far as I understand, it's À rebours meets Groundhog Day...or a man relives aesthetic minutae, or aesthetic minutae becomes his life.

Or is that "I and a friend"?

Me (...) received (a) promo

I (...) received (a) promo

I and a friend received promo copies of this...as far as I understand, it's À rebours meets Groundhog Day...or a man relives aesthetic minutae, or aesthetic minutae becomes his life.

I received a promo copy of this. A friend did, ...more

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Sep 22, 2010 Adam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: black-comedy, heart-of-darkness, noir, literature-fantastique, horror-disguised-as-literature

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a stunner, a breathless plunge into one man’s obsession. For anyone who thought existentialism as a genre of fiction tapped out about the middle of last century is in for a treat. This is a very modern take and a story that invites a wonderful bounty of interpretation and handily ducks each of them. A critique of a society where we are increasingly at the mercy of the whims of the rich, on our need for authenticity, locating meaning in the events our urban surrounding ...more

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Mar 10, 2018 ☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ rated it really liked it

A very damaged story of a very damaged man.
Q:
“If you were the last person to pass through, your ticket should be the top one.” “I was the last one through,” I told him. “No one came past after me. But that’s not my ticket.” “If you were the last one through, then this must be your ticket,” he repeated. It wasn’t my ticket. I started to feel dizzy again. (c)
Q:
Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, th ...more

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Feb 18, 2017 Gumble's Yard rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2010

Really excellent and memorable read, unusually written but satisfying as matches interesting and deep themes with a well written, and internally coherent and consistent (if extremely bizarre) plot and with interesting characters: the narrator obviously but also the facilitator Naz – initially someone who arranges the diaries and lives of rich people but who becomes with this assignment an obsessive information management junkie, actually encouraging the narrator’s obsession rather than checking ...more

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Feb 06, 2009 Jamie rated it did not like it

Shelves: the-lighter-side, i-hated-this

"The Remainder" won the Believer book award, and I thought that gave it a good shot towards being something I would like. Boy, I was wrong. This book is awful. It starts out okay, but then it just devolves into the most painful exercise in futility - which may be the point, but God, this book made me mad.

The unnamed narrator has come into a huge sum of money by being hit by a flying object. He barely remembers the accident but now he has an ungodly amount of money and nothing to do with it. He a ...more

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Sep 19, 2016 Neil rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016

When The Guardian reviewed this novel, they referred to it as "splendidly odd" and I think that is an excellent description.

After a major accident and subsequent rehabilitation, a man is triggered by a crack in someone's wall to "re-enact" memories (although they might not actually be memories). As he has £8.5 million in compensation to play with, his re-enactments are extravagant. But, clearly, his mind after his accident doesn't work quite like a "normal" mind. Things spiral downwards.

This bo ...more

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Jun 08, 2008 Jenne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: logistics, favorites

I think what I liked about this book isn't what most people would like...
But I loved reading about how a very efficient person carried out the very complicated and difficult tasks that were required of him by a crazy person with too much money.
It was very deeply satisfying, on a sort of molecular librarian level.
I think this would make a great book club book, because it's not too long and is pretty easy to read, and the weirdness of it would give you a lot to discuss. ...more

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Nov 16, 2010 unknown marked it as to-not-read-ever

Recommended to unknown by: bizarro donna

My girlfriend read this book and hated it. So there are two reasons not to bother:

1) I usually agree with her about this stuff, so why waste the time?
2) If I read it and love it, she'll just look at me with contempt and shake her head.

Sorry, Tom McCarthy. If it makes you feel any better, I decided to probably not read C all on my own. It just seems annoying is all. ...more

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Jan 22, 2014 Sentimental Surrealist rated it liked it

Is it a sign of Remainder's greatness or its unevenness that I can't come up with a firm stance on it? Well, you could certainly make the first argument. Zadie Smith argues that this could become the future of literature, a novel that makes no attempt at the transubstantial miracles of more conventional fiction (words become people! And a representation of the noble human soul! Hence, so say the realists, the importance, the importance of their conventions!), and as someone who can take or leave Is it a sign of Remainder's greatness or its unevenness that I can't come up with a firm stance on it? Well, you could certainly make the first argument. Zadie Smith argues that this could become the future of literature, a novel that makes no attempt at the transubstantial miracles of more conventional fiction (words become people! And a representation of the noble human soul! Hence, so say the realists, the importance, the importance of their conventions!), and as someone who can take or leave the realist conventions, I do appreciate this novel's relationship with them. Often it seems like it's written in complete ignorance of those conventions - check out McCarthy's weirdly stunted language and his flat refusal to provide his characters with any interiority whatsoever - but sometimes, as in the truly glorious anti-simile "it looked like something that had come out of something," he seems to deliberately poke at and provoke them.

These aspects of the book are all kinds of fun, and McCarthy certainly has his own approach to minimalism. It's got nothing to do with either the under-the-surface minimalism of Carver and Hemingway or the authoritative minimalism of Didion and the other McCarthy. If anything, McCarthy is closest to Bret Easton Ellis' deliberately flattened affect, and I'd be a hell of a lot madder about that if McCarthy was more of a dick about it. Yes, there are plenty of points where he teeters on Ellis and a merciful few where he falls in, mostly toward the novel's funny yet oddly dissatisfying end (too predictable?), but McCarthy's project interests me far more than Ellis'. See, this novel's unnamed protagonist is a recovering amnesiac, and judging by both the nigh-obsessive repetition in the prose structure and the occasional reaches into more conventionally lyrical writing, it strikes me that the simple language is meant to parallel the speaker's attempts to re-comprehend a world that had once seemed so natural to him. The narrator's insistent obfuscation, which he seems completely unaware of, also leads to some deadpan comedy. So far, so good.

My problems with this novel kick in as the plot does, as the narrator grows obsessed with recreating events of his past in search of authenticity. Which leads to a) a lot of rather shallow "nothing is authentic, everything is created" posturing that strikes me, at least, as a knock-off of DeLillo's far more nuanced "realer-than-real" deals (indeed, our very own Greg was astute enough to point out that this gives off early DeLillo vibes), and b) a lot of spinning on narrative wheels. Remainder is a novel that knows exactly what it wants to do and doesn't really stray off the beaten path, but there's a part of me that feels I read the whole novel once I read the first half. Sure, the reenactments get bigger and riskier, and it retains its good qualities up until the end, and it's not as though this particular character was going to develop into a full and self-aware human being or find his much-desired authenticity in a more productive way or anything of the sort. Yet I don't know, I just wanted to shake the thing by the shoulders and yell "MOVE, DAMMIT! YOUR CIRCLES ARE GETTING BIGGER, BUT THEY'RE STILL CIRCLES!" Count me as intrigued by the premise and entertained by the book, but other writers had better build on this if they want it to be the road to the future. ...more

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Jul 23, 2016 Pechi rated it liked it · review of another edition

RIDICULOUS. Some books are written solely to make you scratch your heads until your scalp becomes a memory and this is one of them.

But considering it’s Tom McCarthy, that should not be such a big surprise, right? If you’d read Satin Island before and still wanted to try out McCarthy’s other works (like me), you knew full well what you were getting into. BUT STILL.

I’m all for reading “difficult” books and trying to decipher the hidden meanings. But McCarthy’s Remainder is so obfuscated that I fe RIDICULOUS. Some books are written solely to make you scratch your heads until your scalp becomes a memory and this is one of them.

But considering it’s Tom McCarthy, that should not be such a big surprise, right? If you’d read Satin Island before and still wanted to try out McCarthy’s other works (like me), you knew full well what you were getting into. BUT STILL.

I’m all for reading “difficult” books and trying to decipher the hidden meanings. But McCarthy’s Remainder is so obfuscated that I fear it is merely written that way to confound & may not turn out to have any underlying ingenious core.

I was baffled after reading Satin Island, too. But it did not leave me angry, as Remainder has managed to do. Reading Satin Island was a very luxurious experience, even when we knew it was just a balloon of a book – no story, no big characters, no major occurrences, in fact nothing at all anchoring it to the definitions or responsibilities of a novel. It was rich with philosophy, art theory and many obscure, hidden concepts that I yearned to grasp (if indeed there were any). But at least it was clever & engaging on the surface.

But, Remainder was only vaguely interesting at best & got monotonous halfway through. Every time something new happened to our hero and he got into his thinking, I was screaming “Oh, not again!” It got interesting towards the end. But, I’m unable to escape the feeling that it was all purposeless. I kept waiting for it to turn into a rewarding experience, to provide some explanation or at least show some traces of its alleged brilliance. Nope.
I would’ve been consoled if at least the language was pretty enough. But, McCarthy immerses himself in providing all the minute details (superficial, the lot of them) that he doesn’t care about anything else.

SPOILER – but does not do any real damage, as nothing actually happens

The whole book felt to me like the plane in its climax – a seemingly useless exercise, wandering aimlessly between two fixed points in sky while the hero tries to enjoy the feeling of what exactly, I’m not sure (maybe the pattern, I guess).

I’m also mad at Zadie Smith for endorsing it as one of the best English books in the past decade. Of course, she’s cleverer and must have got what McCarthy really was trying to say. And maybe I’m mad just because of my futile efforts at deciphering it.

Remainder seems to be avant-garde, just for the sake of it. Read it at your own risk. ...more

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Jun 08, 2012 lark benobi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: male-identified-authors, uk, ruthless-books, favorites-21st-century, books-i-ve-read-at-least-twice

Wow! Hmm.

That could be my whole review.

I'm glad I kept the faith while reading this book. The first part gives the impression that you're about to read a confessional weepy survivor story, and then the story veers without warning into a story that grapples in the most graphic way possible with the question of what makes our lives meaningful. It plays with the idea that a few perfect moments in one's life, however brief, are all that is necessary to give life meaning...and then it subverts this ...more

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Mar 01, 2020 Baba rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary

A survivor of a mysterious accident gets locked into repetition and analysis. An at times darkly humorous, well written debut novel by McCarthy, which almost defines classification, originally I was very lazy in just calling it dark humour, and eventually came to the conclusion of defining it as surreal logic! Maybe it was too smart for me, but I found it hard work trying to either understand or enjoy this, although the core premise was interesting. 4 out of 12.

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May 22, 2014 Eric Wojcik rated it it was ok

Baffled by the praise for this book, by so many intelligent readers. Normally this would prompt a hesitation and reassessment but this is one of those books that makes me more irritated the more I think of it. I was positioned on the wrong foot by Zadie Smith's glowing suggestion that the way forward from realist novels lies with McCarthy's book (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...).

Yes, the narrative is unique. A man, newly rich, newly absent his memories, buys scrupulous reconstructions o Baffled by the praise for this book, by so many intelligent readers. Normally this would prompt a hesitation and reassessment but this is one of those books that makes me more irritated the more I think of it. I was positioned on the wrong foot by Zadie Smith's glowing suggestion that the way forward from realist novels lies with McCarthy's book (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...).

Yes, the narrative is unique. A man, newly rich, newly absent his memories, buys scrupulous reconstructions of supremely ordinary events. Okay, so there's this metanarrative thing, at least a nod to how we fashion stories and importance to our existence.

It's just... who gives a crap. Certainly not the protagonist, who is bland and dull. McCarthy generates a frission where we're embarrassed for those paid to reenact for him, and shocked at how he never reacts to those slain nearby. The guy he hires to handle these productions is nicely wry about it, nicely mercenary. There's nice hints early on that we're not in real time at all, but our dude has died or is dying in the hospital.

But when we expect some turn back to true experience -- our hero is not allowed to mention what accident hurt him, even if he remembered -- it's tossed aside for a sequence of these reenactments. The novel's just about trying to find authenticity in the world, one of the most boring considerations to ever inflate our modern city dweller-cum-intellectual's head.

We don't get a nod to how art and authenticity mix with money. We don't get an outside indication of how this is impacting anyone around him. We don't get anything about law, or power, or really about memory. Or the petty obsessions of the newly rich. Or any number of other topics that might have been enriching. Why the title, Remainder?

Instead we get this flat, affectless prose. The kind where we, as the readers, are expected to find -- nay, wander in, aimlessly to find somewhere in the waste areas between flat, boring words -- just some purpose for this book beyond an episodic trick?

In the end, it's not a horrible book, but one I feel is destined for righteously, rigorously earned obscurity. It has this Robbes-Grillet feel without the wit or weirdness. As others have said, it feels like a slim DeLillo novel, shorn of caustic observation and (again) wit. It feels like a barren subgenre to me, like Charlie Kaufman's scripts -- novels and movies about building novels (or stories) and movies (or plays). Yawn. There's too much going on in the world for this nonsense. ...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Tarin Towers rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Tarin by: Maureen

Shelves: 2012, anti-heroes, england, memory, amnesia, quests, morality, insanity, fate-vs-free-will

Remainder is perhaps the most deeply disturbing book I've ever read. I kept having to put it down hoping the plot would change course. Sometimes it did. It didn't really reach the point of no return until toward the end, at which point I couldn't put it down.

The writing is odd -- since the book is about patterns and sequences and reproductions, the writing is kind of flat, like the affect of the character, but it is completely successful at achieving this tone. It's kind of like Ben Marcus but ...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Drew rated it really liked it

Shelves: postmodern-toasties, british-lit

A large portion of this book is very good. The writing style could be construed as antiseptic, but I prefer to go only so far as clean and crisp. And the central concept, restoring authenticity (not a great way of articulating it, granted), is very interesting and well treated, with tons of really great scenes wherein the narrator spends a bunch of money to recreate things he's done a thousand times (just read it) -- until the end, which really sucks. It feels as if McCarthy wrote himself into a ...more

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Jan 20, 2008 Cyrus rated it it was ok

I was inclined, due to a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a work of "existential horror", to read it as an allegory. I'm pretty sure that this was what the author was going for. In my opinion though, the author fell into every trap that makes writing that sort of book difficult.
The main character is a sort of "man without qualities" which is a result of his condition (an accident in which something falls from the sky onto him and places him in a comatose state, which he wakes from w I was inclined, due to a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a work of "existential horror", to read it as an allegory. I'm pretty sure that this was what the author was going for. In my opinion though, the author fell into every trap that makes writing that sort of book difficult.
The main character is a sort of "man without qualities" which is a result of his condition (an accident in which something falls from the sky onto him and places him in a comatose state, which he wakes from with a case of amnesia), but makes him come across as very dull and unsympathetic. I don't feel that a character that is supposed to represent the basic existential condition of the human individual has to come across this way, and it prevented me from any attempt at empathy with the character even though I understood that his experience was supposed to represent my own on some level. The protagonist finds himself extremely rich as the result of a settlement and becomes obsessed with recreating scenes that he has vague memories of in a quest to force into existence settings that will make him feel "real." This seemed to be a metaphor for tendency people have to use memory as a way to distort reality by placing undue significance on arbitrary points in time, but the author failed to do this in a way that would allow the plot(in as much as there was one) to develop in a compelling way. The character uses his money to create an entire apartment building, an experience he had at an auto shop and other scenes, going about it in a way that isn't plausible in any realistic sense and didn't have any value for me other than as a fairly heavy-handed metaphor for how fleeting experiences are as points in constantly fluid time.
As the book progresses the character becomes more and more obsessive and morally bankrupt, but there is never any kind of psychological/ sociological/ political subtext that makes sense of this behavior.
I suppose this is one of those books that is supposed to "mess with the mind" of the reader, and to create the sort of disorientation that is parallel to that which is occurring in the mind of the main character. To me though, it was just a fairly dull story about a petty, jerky kind of guy who for no particular reason becomes completely amoral as a side effect of his obsessive quest to recreate a vague memory he has of being in an apartment with the smell of chicken liver in the air, which he does for no particular reason other than a "tingling" sensation he gets when he is in the recreation. Heavy, man...if that's your idea of a good book.
...more

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Aug 16, 2015 Bandit rated it really liked it

What a strange, strange book. Almost impossible to recommend due to its particular outré of strangeness and yet I liked it very much. The plot is simple enough, A 30 year old Londoner becomes an instant millionaire due to an enormous legal settlement from an undisclosed trauma and goes on to obsessively recreate and reenact dreamlike memories or memorylike dreams sparing no expense. What it was really about though is the pursuit of authenticity. The lengths you'd go to, if nothing around you fel ...more

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Oct 18, 2015 Brian Longtin rated it it was amazing

A tough but rewarding read. Not tough as in dense -- the book is straightforward and compact -- but tough because it plunges you into the mind of a neurotic, obsessive, disaffected man as he relentlessly examines the deepest extremes of mundanity in an attempt to feel "real". A virtual tour of perspectives on the mind's relation to the world, I would love to discuss this with a philosophy professor, though in tone it felt closest to Camus' The Stranger. Lots to reflect on for yourself based on h ...more

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Jul 03, 2017 Kobe Bryant rated it liked it

This guy would have figured everything out if he just smoked some weed

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Dec 05, 2020 Jennyb rated it did not like it

The best thing about this book is the blue color on the cover of the edition I have.

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Mar 31, 2017 S̶e̶a̶n̶ rated it liked it

Shelves: 2017

(3.5) In Remainder the unnamed narrator has experienced a traumatic accident and receives an enormous settlement as a result. Unsure of what to do with his new fortune, he fumbles around a bit until an incident of déjà vu propels him into a intricate full-scale recollection of a flat he'd once occupied. Immediately he decides to use his settlement funds to recreate not only the flat, but the entire building, down to every last detail, in order to 'feel real' again. Thus begins an increasingly el
(3.5) In Remainder the unnamed narrator has experienced a traumatic accident and receives an enormous settlement as a result. Unsure of what to do with his new fortune, he fumbles around a bit until an incident of déjà vu propels him into a intricate full-scale recollection of a flat he'd once occupied. Immediately he decides to use his settlement funds to recreate not only the flat, but the entire building, down to every last detail, in order to 'feel real' again. Thus begins an increasingly elaborate series of staged reenactments designed to shed his inauthentic feeling.

My interest flagged at about the halfway mark, as a denouement of sorts arrived and quickly passed. The book has an 'artsy' feel to it, in that it feels like it is about the experience of observing art without explicitly mentioning art. And in fact, it was first published by a small art-oriented publisher and originally sold only through gallery and museum shops before garnering a few reviews that led to republishing and distribution on a larger scale.

The narrator and other characters are flat. The writing is pleasantly good, not great, enough to keep the pages turning but not enough to inspire me to copy passages down. I have not read any of McCarthy's other books, but from interviews I've read, I understand this muted style to be intentional, so as not to distract from the overarching effect of the book. I was reminded at times of Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the ordinariness of the focus. McCarthy has also internalized Robbe-Grillet, which comes through in the repetition of scenes, the hyper-exposed level of detail, the emotional distance. Overall it has very much of a French sensibility to it, clearly following in the tracks of the Nouveau Roman.

Perhaps the most interesting reading of the book is through the lens of physical trauma. The narrator has had to relearn the most basic movements, to literally carve new pathways in his brain in order to once more move through everyday life. He feels inauthentic at least in part because he's been stripped of so many of his memories. And he is desperate to regain his authenticity. As he begins to observe and participate in his reenactments, he feels a tingling sensation, and over time starts passing into trance-like states. A doctor called to examine him says the trauma victim can unknowingly seek a return to the time of the trauma (perhaps through a reenactment), when the body has responded by releasing natural opioids. There is then an ongoing craving for the resulting bodily sensations, which can provide a cocoon of serenity.

I plan to read more of McCarthy, despite my mixed feelings toward this one. I do believe it's a good book, but the problem with its openness was that I was not moved very much to explore its myriad possibilities. Length was another stumbling block. I felt it ran its course early on, and while I can see a point to the final reenactment and ultimate conclusion, I didn't care for it. Perhaps if the book had been as short as a Touissaint or Robbe-Grillet novel I may have enjoyed it more. ...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Black comedy: Protagonist pays lots of money to recreate a specific scene. Pays a clever guy to do it for him. Maybe set in London. [s]	3	13	May 19, 2020 08:28AM
What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Fiction: Set in South London: Guy who suffered an accident and can’t remember but is suddenly rich starts staging his memories. [s]	3	14	Jun 29, 2018 04:13PM

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About Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy

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Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in B ...more

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“All great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.” — 12 likes

“[...]to be real--to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate.” — 6 likes

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