Rachel Kushner
Standing at an intersection in Shuafat Refugee Camp, in East Jerusalem, I watched as a boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a beat-up sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver’s-side window, signaling like a Nascar driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about 12. Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, published in 2007, is a work of clean and seamless guile. There’s no messy and cumbersome interiority, no ruminating, no sociopolitical context, nor much context at all. Just a contemporary city (London), rendered soberly by an unnamed narrator with a metaphysical problem: He’s had a terrible accident of some kind, feels inauthentic as a result, and proceeds to reenact events of escalating complexity in order to recapture a kind of “rightness,” of time coinciding with itself in an idealized manner. He tries to describe his own post-traumatic condition but has little insight, nothing but a feeling