(Vintage Original)

Tom McCarthy's unnamed narrator in Remainder has recovered from an accident and is now millions of English pounds richer. He's also without a memory and in the midst of a boring existential quandary: He just doesn't feel right. (I was hoping, at this point, for his suicide.)

The narrator's memory is soon partly restored, though his metaphysical pangs are not relieved. Somehow, somehow, he rallies and strides wearily through stock talking points—identity, authenticity, sense-memory, violence, death, etc.—much like a mopey liberal studies sophomore in a dank dorm room in Eugene, Oregon.

In a clever turn, however, his meanderings evolve from inane and innocuous (nine cappuccinos in one sitting just to get a freebie? Unreal! A millionaire begging for change? That's just crazy!) to intriguing and committed. In the narrator's rising need to feel authentic, he hires a bookkeeper, Naz, a tragic and well-wrought character, to facilitate intricately detailed re-enactments: a meticulous re-creation of an apartment in Paris, complete with facsimiles of the narrator's former neighbors; a murder on a London street; a bank robbery so deftly staged the narrator sees fit to make it an actual event. Think of the duo as the Mr. Burns and Smithers of the literary set.

In Remainder, McCarthy exhibits a rare kind of commitment to minutiae and nuance. But rather than conveying the narrator's spazzy monomania in a way that creates suspense, the author's rote cataloging often results in annoying constipation. I had no problem putting the book down when, say, Dog the Bounty Hunter came on the tube.

But this may sound unnecessarily harsh—I actually liked the story. It's hard to deny the merits of a novel in which the narrator fingerbangs the bullet wound of a dead man and cats systematically fall from rooftops to their deaths. And, granted, the existential pickle does come to a full and hysterical, if not Dada-esque, conclusion. But however heavily the coda is interpreted (a plane, alone in the sky, flying infinity loops with its trail dissolving behind), it's really no more metaphysical than Dog standing victorious over a hog-tied Hawaiian crackhead.—Chris Cechin

LINK
• For you deeper thinkers