Like wow! Authenticity! Remainder by Tom McCarthy!

Remainder
Tom McCarthy

I can’t quite put my finger on why exactly I didn’t like Remainder more. I’ve read several reviews praising its innovation, its “existential Everyman,” its modern assessment of happiness and gratification. And while I appreciate these aspects of the novel and applaud McCarthy’s vision, I simply could not connect with the novel on a meaningful level.

Remainder tells how our nameless narrator, a victim of a never-explained accident in which something fell from the sky and sent him into a coma, spends his settlement of 8 million pounds. How does one begin to spend such a vast sum? Wise investments? Real estate? Charitable causes? Gratification of the senses? Nah. Our narrator will do none of these.

Proving there is no limit to what one can do if only possessed of sufficient funds, he spends untold millions in search of “authenticity.” He seeks to recreate a situation gleaned from the fragments of his memory, of an apartment, a crack in the wall, the smell of liver cooking, a pianist practicing. The narrator feels that this memory is the only time he was ever truly authentic; inside that apartment, “all [his] movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural…[he]’d been real—been without first understanding how to try to be…”

Ironically, our narrator wants to be as “authentic,” as effortless, as Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets, as if every move every actor makes isn’t already full of self-conscious awareness. The narrator, unaware of the stupidity of making an actor as a paragon of authenticity, sets forth on a quest to recreate the above conditions. Like an actor, he repeats scenes over and over again, each time practicing authenticity. His quest becomes an obsession and is finally taken past the point of return.

Remainder is far from perfect; for example, I could have done with a condensed version of the recreation scenes. They are admittedly integral to the novel, yet to me they felt too repetitive, and they weren’t all necessary to get the point across. And why does the only American speak like such a tool? To wit: upon learning of our narrator’s wealth, she responds with, “Like wow! It’s so much money!” After he orders champagne to celebrate, she exclaims, “Wow, champagne!” For real, b?

That’s not to say that the novel doesn’t have its strengths: the prose is well written and is rife with literary allusions, and McCarthy poses some valid philosophical questions as well. And yet, for all its literary play and philosophical posing, I was left ultimately unmoved.

In a nutshell: Intellectually interesting but emotionally cold.

Bibliolatry Scale: 3 out of 6 stars