In 2005, a small Paris-based publisher issued Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, in an edition of 750. Metronome Press, founded by curator and cultural historian Clémentine Deliss, had existed for most of the previous decade as a cutting-edge arts magazine. For a moment around 2005, it appeared that the transformation of Metronome, the magazine, into an imprint inspired by both Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press and Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press might be a portent that Paris could reemerge as a center for the avant-garde anglophone literary scene. It seems, though, that both the magazine and the press ceased operations in 2007 and Deliss has since then focused on academic and museum work.

There’s still something satisfying in this tale. An unknown British author, after being rejected by major publishers in the UK, turns to an open-minded, upstart press in Paris. In his 1790 work Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke said, “People will not look forward to prosperity who never look backward to their ancestors.” In turning to Paris to find a publisher for his book, McCarthy was simply looking backwards to his spiritual ancestors: Joyce, Beckett, and Burroughs. George Santayana took this idea of learning from the past a bit further in his 1905 The Life of Reason, this time using a phrase that stuck: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This condition of mindlessly repeating history was one he associated with “children and barbarians.” While Santayana’s declaration seems to be an attack on ignorance, willful or otherwise, it also has a rather bold assumption embedded within it. It assumes both that memory is something we can control and that it is somehow a reliable reference to some objective reality.

Memory, our control of it, and the repetition of the past are major themes in McCarthy’s Remainder. I won’t attempt to recount the plot of the novel since a surface telling would only hint at what lies within it. Although it is presented in a relatively straightforward narrative structure, the novel is like a prism or a kaleidoscope. What is reflected there changes as it is viewed from different angles. Like some textbook on transdimensional geology, it deals with multiple strata of existence. As each layer is examined, however, its instability becomes apparent and there are hints that the next layer is really the important one. But as we consider the new layer the process repeats itself. We can roughly give these layers names: memory, history, identity, time, psychogeography, hauntology, the infinite, and how our individual reality is made up of learned cultural forms. But these terms are only guideposts, as there is a sense that we are really dealing with concepts that transcend language itself. Buried within all this are echoes (traces?) of Proust, Sartre, and Georges Perec.

On one level Remainder is an easy read, as unlike much “experimental” literature it is told in a very clear, linear way. There are even a few moments in the book where it feels like McCarthy may have compromised in order to maintain a semblance of a narrative in which “something happens.” On a more important level, however, it is a very challenging work. Reading it, one either feels completely frustrated (not to mention unnerved) and wants to throw it across the room or is drawn, fascinated, into its complexities. As a reader of this blog, however, you will likely already have an inkling as to which camp you fall within.

—Stephen Canner