Outside A Dog

Unsatisfying books weekend, part two:

Remainder by Tom McCarthy is easily one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. Our unnamed protagonist has been the victim of some sort of accident — his £8.5 million settlement prevents him from sharing the details with us, but we do learn that it involves something falling from the sky — and he’s still missing months worth of memories. At a party one evening, he becomes enraptured with a crack in the wall of his friend’s bathroom as memories start to flood his mind.

With his newfound wealth, he sets out to re-create these memories: he buys and renovates a building to his memory’s exact specifications, and hires people to help him re-create his interactions with them. They are to act specifically as he tells them and to be on-call constantly, so he may indulge himself in these recreations whenever he would like. He obsesses over the details: the shine of the wood floors, the smells wafting from the flat below, the exact position of the sunlight on the floor. Then, he takes it a step further: he sets out to continuously re-enact an encounter he has with three young boys at a tire shop, and then becomes involved with doing the same for a shooting just outside of his flat. And then everything begins to spiral out of control, leading up to one very odd ending.

I have to admit: about three-quarters of the way through this book, I wanted to throw it across the room. A couple of hours (and a nap) later, I was back at it again, wanting to know how it was all going to turn out. I found myself getting as wrapped up as the protagonist himself, and I could only watch as what started out as a whim (’why not re-create this? I have the money, let’s do it!’) turned into an obsession. Maybe that’s why I felt the ending was such a letdown: there’s so much buildup and you spend so much time thinking about this strange man and his strange needs and then poof! it’s over. That’s it? And again with the urge to chuck it against the wall. A crazy, crazy book.