Misreading Remainder

I think Ruth Franklin did a great job with her essay on Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW, but there is one fairly bad misstep: that would be her take on Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which she misreads as “a fairly obvious parody of the realist novel.” Whatever Remainder aspires to, I don’t think it’s that.

Franklin continues:

But it is entirely unclear what is constructive about Remainder. The book, in fact, seems to be predicated upon a fundamental mistake: the assumption that logistics—who goes where and when and how—is the most important element of realism. This is the same mistake made by so many elementary-level novelists who get hung up on the details: they spend a half-page propelling a character through every step required to get out the door. Smith is excited that Remainder pays attention to an aspect of the novel that normally goes undiscussed—the mechanism that constantly whirrs behind the curtain. But this is what great writers must always do and have always done: they are on the lookout for the gaps in literary history, the taboos of yesterday that remain unexplored. It can be done without tricks and games.

Whatever the cleverness of its conceit, it is impossible to avoid noticing that Remainder does not fulfill the first requirement of the novel. Once its schema is laid out, in its first fifty pages or so, there is no pleasure in reading it—not intellectual, not sensual, not emotional. The language is parodically plain. The narrator is a man literally without his own feelings or thoughts, so there is no psychological depth. It is possible to admire the book, but impossible to love it. This is what Smith believes to be the future?

I think, alas, Franklin badly misses the point here. Remainder is a flawed work, but I never detected in it a pointless obsession with logistics or overly plain language. All those narrative machinations build up to something—they are what make the novel interesting—and the fact of McCarthy’s narrator not having a psychology is a feature, not a bug.

Smith has a good read on it in her essay:

For the first fifty pages or so, this is Remainder‘s game, a kind of anti-literature hoax, a wind-up (which is, however, impeccably written). Meticulously it works through the things we expect of a novel, gleefully taking them apart, brick by brick. Hearing of the settlement he “felt neutral…. I looked around me at the sky: it was neutral too—a neutral spring day, sunny but not bright, neither cold nor warm.” It’s a huge sum of money, but he doesn’t like clothes or shoes or cars or yachts. A series of narrative epiphany McGuffins follow. He goes to the pub with a half-hearted love interest and his best friend. The girl thinks he should use the money to build an African village; the friend thinks he should use it to snort coke off the bodily surfaces of girls. Altruism and hedonism prove equally empty. . . .

Remainder‘s way turns out to be an extreme form of dialectical materialism—it’s a book about a man who builds in order to feel. A few days after the fake homeless epiphany, at a party, while in the host’s bathroom, the Enactor sees a crack in the plaster in the wall. It reminds him of another crack, in the wall of “his” apartment in a very specific six-story building he has as yet no memory of ever living in or seeing. In this building many people lived doing many things—cooking liver, playing the piano, fixing a bike. And there were cats on the roof! It all comes back to him, though it was never there in the first place.

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