Monday, October 18, 2010

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Part Walker Percy, part Denis Johnson, part Dave Eggers, this remarkable novel is one of the most thought-provoking I've read in recent years. It develops that stunning late modern theme: the inauthenticity of our lives, and the desire for the ability (perhaps) to more fully inhabit the momentary. OR it's about fiction, our need for mimesis, but then how it fails us because its outcomes are too controlled. OR it's about how failure to accept that life is an untidy succession of remainders leads to violence. I can't decide. I need to think about it much more, the sign of a good book.