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A review by tasharobinson
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
3.0
Fascinating premise — a man who lost his memory in an accident, and has millions of dollars to burn after the financial settlement — becomes obsessed with first re-creating a tiny sliver of memory in vast detail over and over and over, then with re-creating events that happen to him or other people. The ending has a sense of tragedy and inevitability, as it becomes clear how far he's fallen into his obsessions, and how little connection he has to the real world. It strongly reminded me of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, in terms of the artistic obsession with re-enactments at the expense of the rest of the world.
The problem with the book for me is that so much of it focuses in vast and eventually suffocatingly repetitive detail on those re-creations, and the detail put into them, and the way the protagonist moves back and forth through them, trying to capture this one tiny feeling of satisfaction. In that sense, the book is more like House Of Leaves when it devolves into mind-bogglingly long lists of architectural details. Such a high percentage of the book is spent on the exact kind of roof tile the protagonist wants to re-create a building, or exactly where everyone needs to stand and what they need to look like, or just the process of him mechanically making everyone do the same things over and over and over while he looks for the vague tingling feeling that means they got it right. I suspect that stripped of repetitive and obsessive detail, this could have been a mesmerizing novella or even a short story. Instead, it feels padded, and so obsessively circular and redundant that I sometimes felt the author was trying to lull me into a state as mentally deranged as the protagonist's, where all this endlessly duplicated trivia actually meant something.
The problem with the book for me is that so much of it focuses in vast and eventually suffocatingly repetitive detail on those re-creations, and the detail put into them, and the way the protagonist moves back and forth through them, trying to capture this one tiny feeling of satisfaction. In that sense, the book is more like House Of Leaves when it devolves into mind-bogglingly long lists of architectural details. Such a high percentage of the book is spent on the exact kind of roof tile the protagonist wants to re-create a building, or exactly where everyone needs to stand and what they need to look like, or just the process of him mechanically making everyone do the same things over and over and over while he looks for the vague tingling feeling that means they got it right. I suspect that stripped of repetitive and obsessive detail, this could have been a mesmerizing novella or even a short story. Instead, it feels padded, and so obsessively circular and redundant that I sometimes felt the author was trying to lull me into a state as mentally deranged as the protagonist's, where all this endlessly duplicated trivia actually meant something.