An Assassin Comes to the Novel

I came to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder through Zadie Smith. Her essay in Changing My Mind drew a line between Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and McCarthy’s novel; staged them as opposites, two directions the contemporary novel might still travel. Netherland as continuation. Remainder as interruption. She writes:

Remainder…comes to literature as an assassin, to kill the novel stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternative road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.

An unnamed man, injured in an accident, comes into money. He uses it to restage fragments of memory, obsessively, on an escalating scale. These are not attempts to remember but to reconstruct, to control. It is a novel about repetition without resolution. His motives are unclear. His actions, increasingly unhinged.

The prose is flat, careful, rhythmic in its precision. There is something narcotic in the effect: part novel, part procedure. I kept wondering where it would go, what it would resolve, if anything. The final reenactment disappointed; too easy. I closed the book uneasy, unsure. But that may be the point. Smith calls it “constructive deconstruction.” I will need to return before I understand what she means.