What is this all of a sudden, a literary blog?

At some point during my adolescence, my internal monolog quieted down. I don’t know when, exactly. It went from anxiously evaluating everything -- a bit like a play-by-play announcer, but more concerned -- to being discreet, or not there at all. I suppose that’s just part of growing up -- getting more confident, taking action by instinct -- but I remember recognizing this change and worrying, quite intently, if I had lost some part of myself. If that internal monolog was me, and it’s gone, then where’d I go? And who’s this other guy now performing my actions?

Imagine doing it in reverse. First you’re fluid, in the moment, then suddenly your actions require additional care and precision. You’d long, I suppose, for the days when your actions felt as though they were yours. That’s the set-up for Remainder, a novel by Tom McCarthy that I recently finished, and which I highly advise checking out. (Disclaimer: A Random House guy sent me a review copy, along with a letter that says, “I’m not even going to ask you to spread the word about it because I don’t think I need to. Frankly, I would defy you to read it and not talk about it.” And it’s true. I’d have written about this regardless of where I got the book from.)

The story is driven by a nameless narrator, a man who has suffered a serious accident and has had to relearn basic motor skills. It bothers him greatly, having to relearn movements, because he feels separate from his environment -- a man who must control his actions, surrounded by people who simply are their actions. The company responsible for the accident gives him a ton of money in a settlement, and the narrator begins spending it on things he thinks will allow him to recapture a sense of self. It’s a strange, sometimes maddeningly weird book, but remarkable for the way it captures and expresses this feeling of self-disconnectedness, and then acknowledges how difficult it is to express it. Hell, I don’t think I ever tried articulating the feeling I had while growing up. I don’t even know if what I wrote above makes sense.

One of my favorite scenes comes early in the book, when he’s watching a group of homeless people and “started thinking that these people, finally, were genuine. That they weren’t interlopers. That they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment that they were in.” So he approaches one of the homeless men, and tries talking to him about it:

“Well,” I said. “I want to know … Well, what I want to know is … Okay: when you’re sitting on your patch of street, sitting there wrapped up in your sleeping bag, with your dog curled up in your lap … You’re sitting there, and there are people going by—well, do you … What I really want to know…”

I stopped. It wasn’t coming out right. I took a deep breath and started again:

“Look,” I told him. “You know in films, when people do things—characters, the heroes, like Robert De Niro, say—when they do things, it’s always perfect. Anything at all. It could be opening a fridge, or lighting up a—no, say picking up a napkin, for example. The hero would pick it up, and give it a simple little flick, and tuck it in his collar or just fold it on his lap, and then it wouldn’t bother him again for the whole scene. And then his dialog will be just perfect too. You see what I mean? If you or I tried that, it would keep slipping out and falling.”

My homeless person picked his napkin up again. “You want me to tuck it in my shirt?” he asked.

“No,” I told him. “That’s not the point. The point is that I wonder, I just wonder, whether you’re aware of this. When you sit on your corner.”

“I don’t use no napkins when I eat,” he said.

I imagine conversations like this happened a lot when the author tried explaining what his book was about. Apparently, and not surprisingly, he didn’t get very far until it was already published. According to the Random House rep, Remainder was originally released by a small press in Paris, which printed only 750 copies. A blogger eventually passed it along to a friend who works as a Random House sales rep, who got it into the hands of an editor. And here we are.

Posted by Jason Feifer at March 16, 2007 11:58 AM