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Feb. 9th, 2012 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI'm reading Tom McCarthy's Remainder and I want to make everyone run out and read it now. It's just so clever and fantastic and smartass while at the same time being realistic and incredibly, incredibly heartfelt. It's the book I wished Fight Club was, on several axes.
Remainder is the story of a man who was involved with a horrible accident that was the fault of some large corporate entity. The large corporate entity pays him a multimillion dollar settlement to not speak about the incident. In the aftermath, the hero has to piece together a life from the remainder, from the things left over once he recovers from his coma.
The language he uses to describe the details of his physical therapy, his attempts to recover his memory, the pure mechanics of rediscovering his body, is incredibly vivid and moving. But what makes the novel profound and unexpected and amazing is his trajectory as he begins to recover and search for more than mere physical recovery. The narrator decides that with his immense windfall he is going to attempt to physically reenact a dream he had, a dream where he existed in a state of total comfort with his own mind and body. He buys a building, hires architects and contractors to make the building look like the one in his dream, trains actors to impersonate the other people in his dream, and he steps through this dreamscape-made-real, this incredible construct that is designed to make him feel like his life is not a construct.
It may be the best I've ever seen someone write God as a character, write the act of creation itself. After the first day of the constructed dreamscape, his chief contractor asks him if he liked it and he says, "It's a good beginning." It took me back to childhood grapples with "And God saw that it was Good, and he rested." What did that mean? How was he judging goodness? Did he have some preconceived expectation of what the world he was creating looked like, and was he measuring how well it conformed to that expectation? If God could create perfectly with a word, why did he need to judge it afterward? Was there anything unexpected in creation, or did everything go according to plan? If there was something unexpected, some deviation, was that deviation bad, or was it part of the good? What is good, what is tov?
In any case, this moment in Remainder hit those themes and those questions about as effectively as I've ever seen them written. I want everyone to run out and read the book right now.
Remainder is the story of a man who was involved with a horrible accident that was the fault of some large corporate entity. The large corporate entity pays him a multimillion dollar settlement to not speak about the incident. In the aftermath, the hero has to piece together a life from the remainder, from the things left over once he recovers from his coma.
The language he uses to describe the details of his physical therapy, his attempts to recover his memory, the pure mechanics of rediscovering his body, is incredibly vivid and moving. But what makes the novel profound and unexpected and amazing is his trajectory as he begins to recover and search for more than mere physical recovery. The narrator decides that with his immense windfall he is going to attempt to physically reenact a dream he had, a dream where he existed in a state of total comfort with his own mind and body. He buys a building, hires architects and contractors to make the building look like the one in his dream, trains actors to impersonate the other people in his dream, and he steps through this dreamscape-made-real, this incredible construct that is designed to make him feel like his life is not a construct.
It may be the best I've ever seen someone write God as a character, write the act of creation itself. After the first day of the constructed dreamscape, his chief contractor asks him if he liked it and he says, "It's a good beginning." It took me back to childhood grapples with "And God saw that it was Good, and he rested." What did that mean? How was he judging goodness? Did he have some preconceived expectation of what the world he was creating looked like, and was he measuring how well it conformed to that expectation? If God could create perfectly with a word, why did he need to judge it afterward? Was there anything unexpected in creation, or did everything go according to plan? If there was something unexpected, some deviation, was that deviation bad, or was it part of the good? What is good, what is tov?
In any case, this moment in Remainder hit those themes and those questions about as effectively as I've ever seen them written. I want everyone to run out and read the book right now.