Tom McCarthy’s Meaningless Men
Early in his career, the English novelist Tom McCarthy would occasionally let it be known that he didn’t think much of contemporary literature. Publishing, he told one interviewer, had “gone very middlebrow” and “turned its back on the legacy of modernism.” If the official “crap art” of the Soviet regimes was socialist realism, he declared, then the official crap art of neoliberal regimes was “sentimental humanism”—and the antidote, he insisted, was to be found not in fiction but in the art world, where “literary ideas are received, debated, and creatively transformed.”
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“Remainder” (2005), McCarthy’s début, seemed to prove his point. It’s a strange book with a simple premise: a young man receives a settlement of eight and a half million pounds after something (“parts, bits”) falls from the sky, leaving him amnesiac and forced to relearn his motor skills. He’s initially unsure what to do with his money: philanthropy seems pointless; reckless hedonism leaves him cold. But, at a party, the sight of a crack in a wall brings on a powerful sense of déjà vu. “I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack,” he says. Other details about this place resurface: the smell of liver frying in the apartment below, someone practicing the piano, a view of cats lounging across a red-tiled roof. “Right then I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money,” he tells us. “I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again.”
And so he does. The novel chronicles, in minute detail, the “reenactments” that the narrator single-mindedly dedicates his fortune to staging. After successfully replicating the apartment, he moves, with the same seriousness, to a tire change at a garage, before graduating to a drive-by shooting. There are no real narrative reversals in “Remainder,” no dramatic ups and downs—just an exuberant sense of increasing scale as these reënactments become more daring and complex. “It struck me,” McCarthy’s narrator reflects, “that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics.” “Remainder” was, on one level, about making art, about the struggle to claw meaning out of ordinary experience. But the novel also manages to feel like a piece of contemporary art, like stepping inside the literary equivalent of the “white cube”—the sort of spare, high-ceilinged gallery space that became ubiquitous in the nineteen-seventies.
In the two decades that have passed since “Remainder” was published, McCarthy has written five novels, one collection of essays, a nimble book on the literary techniques within the “Tintin” series, and a monograph on the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Each novel rhymes with, and occasionally winks at, the others. Characters recur, settings are shared, scenarios repeat themselves. Across his fiction, McCarthy returns again and again to secret codes, encrypted documents, and radio transmissions; he has a fondness for the history of the early twentieth century—in his words, a time of “political and aesthetic radicalism”—and for some of its more colorful figures, from Tristan Tzara to Guglielmo Marconi. McCarthy has long been upfront about his enthusiasm for the French nouveau roman and, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, he describes mundane objects and spaces in obsessive detail—the “luminescent and gelatinous” floor of a parking garage, the “cambered upper surface” of a pill. He’s delicately amused by postmodern wordplay (“birth” being misheard as “berth,” and so on). He has not quite managed to blow up the realist novel, but with each book he has doggedly extended the set of images, themes, and preoccupations that he first introduced in “Remainder.” With “The Rhyl Poster,” his sixth novel, there is the sense that he may, at last, have exhausted them.
McCarthy’s characters are often devoid of backstory—“Remainder” was narrated by a virtual tabula rasa—but Benjamin Stanton, “The Rhyl Poster” ’s protagonist, comes nearly overladen with personal history. He’s an orphan, raised amid the “nasty, brutish hierarchies” of a children’s home. He’s a surveyor, a veteran of the Iraq War who brought “blind spots” into “cartographic daylight.” He’s a stutterer, whose halted speech (carefully evoked through colons and dashes) “made his sentences seem pregnant with meanings . . . which, for the listener, would emerge only later.” His disfluency also brings him “sexual adventures.” “Women,” McCarthy informs us, “would become hypnotised by it.”
Stutterer, seducer, soldier-surveyor, foundling—at the start of “The Rhyl Poster,” Stanton is working at the Court of Justice of the European Union. He’s a référendaire, in charge of carrying out legal research and drafting opinions. It sounds like boring work, but McCarthy describes it in a state of rapture. It’s the référendaires (the English terms “law clerk” and “legal secretary,” we’re told, “fall far short as equivalents”) who conjure up that “repeatable epiphany, like godhead on demand, the miracle of law-giving interpretation.”
Stanton is the best of them. He has “rep.” When he walks into the C.J.E.U., McCarthy writes, “his passage through it, like that of a magnetised rod across a field of iron filings, generated, even on a normal day, larger than usual swirls of reaction and attraction.” He’s particularly respected for his written opinions—which “often acquired a canonical status of their own”—and he’s just been charged with drafting a landmark ruling: Kohlhas v. Elrond. The details of the case are kept vague, but Elrond is a shadowy data-analytics corporation using an “emergent form of computation” to make people’s private information public, while Kohlhas (naturally) represents a ragtag band of activists determined to stop them. Stanton’s ruling, he’s told, will address “the core issues of our time.” The pressure is on.
Writing about the law, McCarthy confesses in the acknowledgments to “The Rhyl Poster,” is “like enquiring into air.” It’s a surprising admission for a writer who, on most days, seems delighted by complexity—who, in his essays, can tease out the connections between Joseph Conrad and MC Hammer; and who, in his last two novels, used anthropology and time-and-motion studies as a kind of intellectual scaffolding from which to dangle his characters. The law, then, should lend itself to McCarthy’s talents. Yet throughout “The Rhyl Poster,” the aspects of the justice system that he seems most enamored of—its scope and scale—are exactly what defeat his attempts to contain it in prose. In the span of a few pages, he tells us that the C.J.E.U. is a “motor,” a “giant word-processor,” a “magical bureau,” the “apex-wedge in the arch,” a “percolating-radiating commutation,” and, finally, a motor again: “The CJEU may be a motor but, made up of moving, clashing, bidirectionally thrusting-pulling and, thanks to that same configuration, reciprocally propelling parts, it’s far from being a monolith.” Some writers tend toward inarticulacy as they get older—by the end of his career, Beckett was trading in lonely phrases and flinty little fragments. McCarthy is going the other way. A geeky tang that first announced itself in “The Making of Incarnation” (2021)—with its Feynman diagrams and Fisher kernels, Prandtl tunnels and hyper-converged-infrastructure systems—has forcefully asserted itself over McCarthy’s prose. “The Rhyl Poster” is full of references to “networks and spreads,” “channels of association and disclosure,” avenues and angles, vectors, eddies, and “contrafluvial vectors.” We’re adrift here, having basically learned that the European legal system is big and complicated, and that McCarthy has a great many words for saying so. Occasionally, it seems that he is aware of the problem himself:
As if in answer, the novel gets plottier: Stanton, we discover, has been feeding court documents to Pirotti, an impish Swiss Italian who heads a mysterious legal N.G.O. (Pirotti first appeared in “The Making of Incarnation,” as an advocate for an open-source “economy of knowledge.”) In return, Stanton receives pills, some sort of painkiller that he daintily refers to as “petits bleus.” This professional betrayal of the C.J.E.U. weighs on Stanton. Never mind Kohlhas v. Elrond; to assuage his guilt, he decides that he must write a “counter-confession.” Not only will his confession be a “testament to document leakage,” it will “lay the groundwork for the founding of a whole new order.” McCarthy goes on:
Squint and you might see the bones of a legal thriller—a John Grisham paperback written by Georges Perec. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll realize that “The Rhyl Poster” is nearly identical to McCarthy’s last two novels. In “Satin Island” (2015), a corporate anthropologist, deciding that our times call for “a single intellect, a universal joint to bring them all together once again,” starts planning a similarly ambitious “Great Report.” In “The Making of Incarnation,” a motion-capture specialist becomes obsessed with finding a box—“Box 808”—that once found will “change everything.” Repetition and reënactment might be the twin engines of McCarthy’s fiction, but it’s slightly disheartening to read about these men and their fruitless attempts to construct “some kind of infrastructural master-meaning” out of their times. The corporate anthropologist never even begins his Great Report. Box 808 remains lost; nothing changes. Stanton, sitting down to draft his counter-confession, finds himself struck with writer’s block. Instead, he reverts to a private shorthand composed of “quasi-mathematical or electronic symbols,” “coils, arrows, and spirals, divagations and reroutings,” “twists and springs and flight-lines,” and “giant gaps and chasms.” Stanton’s confession ends up being incomprehensible to anyone but himself—an irony that McCarthy, with his partiality for secret codes, seems to take great pleasure in.
As I plodded through “The Rhyl Poster,” I had the irritating sense that McCarthy was hovering somewhere over my shoulder, chuckling at my dutiful annotations and frequently exasperated comments. His novels have a way of preëmpting criticism (“Events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now,” he writes at the start of the largely eventless “Satin Island”), but “The Rhyl Poster” went beyond those usual impulses: it seemed designed to deflect any of the pleasures I associated with reading. The sentences, packed with jargon, beat me down with their elaborate banality. The plot, recycled wholesale from “Satin Island,” seemed at once frantically busy and totally empty. If the experience of reading “Remainder” was like stepping into the cool and quiet of a gallery, then reading “The Rhyl Poster” reminded me of stumbling into a junk shop, cluttered and overflowing with the bits and bobs McCarthy has collected throughout his career. I made it to the end and put the book aside. Only then, oddly, did it start to grow on me.
For twenty years, McCarthy has been swimming against the current, writing novels that reflect, with unusual intensity, his disdain for the conventional underpinnings of literary fiction. “We don’t want plot, depth or content,” he wrote in an essay on the Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint. “We want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content; geometry is everything.” He’s had to capitulate somewhat—his novels do have plots, even if they’re increasingly the same one—but there’s something moving about his refusal to abandon the project. “The Rhyl Poster” ’s most ecstatic passages are reserved for Stanton’s drafting of his counter-confession; in them, McCarthy describes a “radical, explosive document” that will, once complete, “produce the readers it demanded.” Ultimately, of course, no one reads it. But McCarthy writes about the making of it with a feverish conviction that nothing else in the novel matches—not Stanton’s lumpy backstory, not the knotty intricacies of the C.J.E.U., not all the talk of networks and vectors and spreads. Whatever else has drained out of McCarthy’s fiction in the course of six novels, his conviction that they might be worth writing clearly has not.
Still, at some point a writer so committed to a single method has to wonder what’s left to do with it. Stanton, reflecting on his document-smuggling, decides that it constitutes “a topographic, not a spiritual, drama.” The phrase might well describe McCarthy’s entire career. He’s never had much interest in how or what his characters feel, but in “The Rhyl Poster” ’s last chapters, he seems to be attempting to escape them altogether. There’s drama at the C.J.E.U., Stanton is reaching some sort of epiphany, but McCarthy veers off to dreamily consider “plantations, row after row of tobacco or sugar cane,” or the “wakes of boats, etched on the surface of the sea.” He might never again write a novel as clean and spare—or plainly enjoyable—as “Remainder.” But the novelist who once found his inspiration in the art world’s curated spaces seems, in these moments, to be finding his way toward another kind of book: one that stops trying to X-ray bureaucracies and institutions and starts, more simply, looking at the world. ♦