This book was a big disappointment. After suffering a horrible accident, the main character must learn how to move all over again. He must learn how to use his body, how to walk. After watching a movie with his friends, it occurs to him that all of his movements feel fake. Robert Deniro in the movie was not fake, he was smooth natural. He wants to feel that way. In order to accomplish this, he decides to re-enact memories of his life at a time where he felt real. He can make a perfect re-enactment from the most mundane of memories. He accomplishes this through his settlement from the accident (8million pounds). He buys an entire apartment building, hires actors, and creates smells and sounds just so he can feel that moment of "realness". Even though it isn't real. It seemed like this books was going somewhere by the concept. It didn't. He just kept re-enacting everything he saw, to the point that something very bad happens. Nothing is really resolved and there is no real epiphany here. Just a good idea, that falls flat. ( )

I read this because of Zadie Smith's review in the NYRB. (That review needs a review of its own! Smith is terribly ignorant of the history of experimental novels, and the scholarship about them. Her range of references is a wild as a Freshman's. Why in the world did the NYRB ask her to write that?)

A good test of a book is how it stays in your mind, and -- ideally -- asks you to return to it. When I can, I try to wait a month or two before I write a review. Now, about three months later, I can barely remember this book. It is part of the post-De-Lillo self-alienation that also produced "Fight Club"; the closest contemporary novel is Galchen's "Atmospheric Disturbances." The difficulty with all three of these is the cushion of capitalism, the comfort provided by the material and commercial world, which prevents anything approaching Kafka's deeper anxiety. The glibness of Galchen makes her sound a bit like Nicholson Baker, and it is good that McCarthy opts for a blanker, more Beckett-like prose. But without lots of entertainment at the surface, and without the real depth of "The Metamorphosis" or "The Judgment," what's left is a pasttime: existentialism as a hobby, a writer's device.

If Guy Debord were alive, he would burn this book. McCarthy's narrator is unsure of the reality that srrounds him, and of himself, and he never quite solves it: but from the perspective of someone like Debord, the shopping in this novel is already enough pleasure to keep the characters, and their author, in a happy sleepwalking state in perpetuity. ( )

Remainder is a very interesting and entertaining book, but hard to recommend because many people will find it the exact opposite of those two things.

I don't usually go in for novels that have such a strong scent of the academy about them. Many people will find this book pretentious and suitable only for discussion around a seminar table.

But McCarthy succeeded in drawing this reader into the protagonist's strange world. His search for authenticity through meticulously re-enacting scenes from his life is funny and terrifying at the same time.

This novel discards with most of the basics people assume as being essential to fiction—at least of the popular sort. You need to read carefully to see the small changes that indicate the story is indeed moving forward. But despite all odds it comes together into a coherent and strangely beautiful whole. ( )

Remainder is easily one of the strangest books I've ever read. Our unnamed protagonist has been the victim of some sort of accident -- his £8.5 million settlement prevents him from sharing the details with us, but we do learn that it involves something falling from the sky -- and he's still missing months worth of memories. At a party one evening, he becomes enraptured with a crack in the wall of his friend's bathroom as memories start to flood his mind.

With his newfound wealth, he sets out to re-create these memories: he buys and renovates a building to his memory's exact specifications, and hires people to help him re-create his interactions with them. They are to act specifically as he tells them and to be on-call constantly, so he may indulge himself in these recreations whenever he would like. He obsesses over the details: the shine of the wood floors, the smells wafting from the flat below, the exact position of the sunlight on the floor. Then, he takes it a step further: he sets out to continuously re-enact an encounter he has with three young boys at a tire shop, and then becomes involved with doing the same for a shooting just outside of his flat. And then everything begins to spiral out of control, leading up to one very odd ending.

I have to admit: about three-quarters of the way through this book, I wanted to throw it across the room. A couple of hours (and a nap) later, I was back at it again, wanting to know how it was all going to turn out. I found myself getting as wrapped up as the protagonist himself, and I could only watch as what started out as a whim ('why not re-create this? I have the money, let's do it!') turned into an obsession. Maybe that's why I felt the ending was such a letdown: there's so much buildup and you spend so much time thinking about this strange man and his strange needs and then poof! it's over. That's it? And again with the urge to chuck it against the wall. A crazy, crazy book. ( )

For a few years I’ve been teaching “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy--an essay ostensibly about the feeling of discovery, but also about sovereign control of one’s own perceptions, about willful sacrifice of that control, and about the evil of sacrificing the present moment to the domination of the present and the future.
McCarthy’s protagonist is, to an extent, seeking a similar sovereignty. But he chases it through the reenactment: by returning obsessively, lovingly, completely, to the single mysterious moments in which he felt clarity. Staging them, rebuilding them, recreating them--and in this complete simulacrum, he feels closer than he ever has to being real.
On the surface it’s an easy reversal: nothing feels real except for the staged. But beneath is what can only be described as insight--for as the game continues, I agree with the narrator’s discoveries, even as the implications of them become more sinister. I feel their logic. And at the end of the novel--when the narrator is quite happy, in fact, and no one else has any good reason to be--I feel doubly possessed, haunted, by that conflation.
What I’m trying to say is that, when I finished Remainder, I didn’t talk for a while. I felt that some trauma had been done to my cherished little neural paths, and I needed some time inside of that trauma. It took a while to remember: it is a Sunday. I am at the window of my livingroom. I am looking over a courtyard. It is Fall. I came slowly back into myself--and I’m hardpressed to remember a book that had so thoroughly rewired me.
I should give some warnings: this machine takes a while to get to full speed. At or around page 80, I took a peek deeper in to reassure myself that the rest of the trip would be worth it. For the most part I speed-read the first 150 pages. Then, the patterns started looping back. And like some chant, I fell into its rhythms.
Other things I can’t stop thinking about: Buddhism (of course). But everything makes me think of Buddhism right now. Boys of Life by Paul Russell. Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, Guy Debord, all the glorious complicators of the real. Autism, art, autistic art, and the smell of cordite. ( )