Remainder: A Novel

By Tom McCarthy

2006

322 pages / 8 hours and 39 minutes

Fiction

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I could review Life of Pi, a wonderfully engaging and almost universally loved novel from the early 2000s. Or I could review The Kite Runner, a heart-rending, bighearted book that had me screaming at the audio as I was listening to it. If you have not read those, then get to it. But those books were so widely read and beloved, I scarcely have anything to add to readers’ already formed opinions. Double ditto on any of the Harry Potter novels.

So at the risk of alienating readers who are wondering if I’m going to talk about their favorite book, let me review one that no one I know or have ever met has read. This seems a little strange, because the book received a front page review in the New York Times Book Review, and that is a very big deal. Published in 2006, it was the author’s first novel. Front page status for a first book – surely that’s the fast track to uber popularity. But while the author is deeply respected and admired, I can’t tell that he’s particularly popular.

The book is Remainder by Tom McCarthy. He has written a couple of novels since, but this one has stuck with me. How do I explain this very strange novel? Here is the setup as described on the back cover (no spoiler here): “A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with.” But if you think he’s going to set off in wild and riotous living because he can afford to do absolutely anything he wants to, you have dropped into the wrong novel. This is not The Picture of Dorian Gray. Rather, it is more reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.

The brain injury that our antihero has received seems to have made him not quite right. I know that’s an odd way to put it, but then we don’t know very much about who he was prior to the accident. He has developed the need for everything to run according to a very rigid pattern. He buys a whole building and hires people to do the same things over and over at the same time every day. He calls it “turning the building on,” and he hires people to reenact actual local events. If this all sounds weird, I can assure you that it is. And very disturbing. One reviewer called it “an assured work of existential horror… Perfectly disturbing.” Now, if that doesn’t make you want to read the book I can’t imagine what would.

Esteemed author Jonathan Lethem describes it as “a stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects: happiness.” Existential horror versus happiness. You have to admit it’s a pretty interesting book that can evoke both reactions. Of all the books I’ve ever read, this is one of the strangest. So when you finish Life of Pi and The Kite Runner, branch out a bit and give this one-of-a-kind novel a chance. Then send me an email. I will be dying to know what you thought of it.