Tom McCarthy’s Remainder won the 2008 Believer Magazine Book Award. The novel was also featured prominently (alongside personal fave The Raw Shark Texts) in an essay by Joyce Carol Oates about amnesia lit. The novel seemed to be a mandatory addition to my “to be read” stack, and receiving a copy as a birthday present sealed the deal.
Despite its inclusion in Oates’ insomnia article, the unnamed protagonist in Remainder does not have amnesia per se. He remembers everything about his life except for the details surrounding an accident that caused him serious injury.
I have images, half-impressions: of being, or having been–or, more precisely, being about to be–hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colors; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap–the crater–that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things.
As a result of the accident, our narrator is forced to undergo extensive physical therapy to relearn how to perform virtually all motor functions. Learning how to move requires “rerouting” his brains connections.
Rerouting is exactly what is sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along…the physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain–an unused, fallow patch…
These new connections, necessarily different from the original, leave our narrator feeling as though he were a stranger in his own body, as though his actions are not his own. Occasionally though, an action or a sound will spark a feeling within him that feels genuine and seems to be a brief glimpse into his past. And here’s where our novel gets strange.
Our narrator has received an enormous cash settlement – one of the largest in the history of England -for his injuries. Having a huge sum of money at his disposal and nothing else to do with his time, the narrator begins to stage events in the hope of catching glimpses of his former reality. These reenactments are absurdly resource intensive, at times involving the purchase of an apartment building filled with actors, cordoning off city blocks, building detailed models of real city blocks inside of a warehouse, etc. As the recreations become ever more elaborate, the narrator’s connections to the real world become increasingly diminished. The narrative becomes almost mechanical as our narrator distances himself more and more from reality. McCarthy follows the narrator’s actions to their logical, and terrifying, conclusion.
I enjoyed Remainder, but I feel hesitant to recommend it to others whose reading interests I don’t know very well – if that makes any sense. It’s an unusual and unsettling book, as any book in which the underpinnings of reality and identity are realistically questioned must be.
Audio bonus: While writing this, a song that fits our narrator perfectly popped up in my iTunes:
The National – Secret Meeting
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Books | Tim | 
September 10, 2008 7:44 am | 
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