REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy

Reviewed by Patrick Walsh

What do an undisclosed “accident,” ₤8.5 million, and a small crack above a bathroom mirror have in common? Answer: together they are the catalysts behind Tom McCarthy’s first novel Remainder, the contemporary story of an anonymous, London-bred narrator and his painstaking efforts to precisely reconstruct specific moments in time. McCarthy begins his work slowly, as if consciously trying to preserve the ambiguity and detached nature of the narrator, who, after an inexplicable incident involving falling machinery and a resulting settlement, is left as wealthy as he is mentally distorted. Despite the deliberate start, Remainder cleverly diverges from the orderly and the methodical into what can only be described as bizarre and completely out of control. (more…)

LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS by Ayelet Waldman

Reviewed by Heidi Immesberger

Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the engrossing and skillfully-written story of a woman who struggles to understand and to practice love in the aftermath of losing her infant daughter. In the months after her infant passed away, Emilia Greenleaf, an upper-class Manhattan attorney and the novel’s protagonist, struggles most to relate to her stepson, William. A bright and well-spoken five year old—perhaps unrealistically so—William challenges Emilia and places her in the line of fire of his intelligent, sophisticated, and angry ex-wife mother. The relationship between Carolyn and Emilia, carefully conducted through William and his father, Jack, is one of the best elements of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. (more…)

Tom McCarthy’s Music-Related List on Dusted Magazine

Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Tom McCarthy and Papercuts.

Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder, to be released in America on Tuesday by Vintage, is exemplarily contemporary, not least for its history, which is as unrepresentatively representative, and soon to be as well rehearsed, as, alas, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s. Written in 2001, and admired by British editors but rejected by their marketing departments, Remainder circulated with McCarthy in the British art world and made its way to Paris, where in 2005 it was published in an edition of 750 by Metronome, a press modelled after Olympia (or, more accurately, an art project reenacting Olympia’s Parisian lit-porn one-two). When well reviewed back home, Remainder was reprinted for the mass market by Alma, a British independent, but not before the majors had: come begging; fucked off. Vintage’s editor in chief, meanwhile, read Remainder in the last of its Metronome edition and fell hard, and he now brings it to the U.S. in paperback. (read more…)

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier

Reviewed by Melissa Fish

The entire compendium of world literature and philosophy is sprinkled with conjectures as to what happens to people when they die, a universal question that has transcended culture and time. Kevin Brockmeier, in his novel The Brief History of the Dead, provides his own unique answer to this question by drawing particularly on African traditions and creating a place called the City, populated by those who have died but are remembered by those still living. The City parallels our own world in every possible way; its inhabitants eat, sleep, work, and speculate on the uncertainty of what will happen when they leave the City for the next stage of death. In an intriguing narrative style that serves to emphasize this parallel, Brockmeier alternates chapters about the City with chapters that take place in the living world, telling the story of Laura Byrd, a woman trapped alone in Antarctica, and her struggles to survive and escape.

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COMPANY by Max Barry

Reviewed by Ellen Wernecke

Something’s rotten in the state of corporation in Max Barry’s third novel Company. Sales assistant Jones has been recruited out of college to work for Zephyr, a busy and successful company which does… well, Jones isn’t sure, but he’s eager to find out. Rivalries stripe his new department of Training Sales, but all Jones knows is that he’s already earned the ire of his cubicle-mate, who hasn’t been promoted in five years.

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Video Inspired by REMAINDER

This video was created for the book Remainder by Tom McCarthy. Music by Sol Seppy is featured. It’s possibly one of the most hauntingly cool things we’ve seen in a long time….

THEATRE OF FISH by John Gimlette

Reviewed by Ari Glogower

Newfoundland, again? Haven’t we heard enough about that God-forsaken rock? Hold that yawn because this isn’t your mother’s book about Newfoundland. John Gimlette’s new travelogue forgoes the pat National Geographic formulations of a rugged people wresting survival from a harsh landscape. Perhaps most startling, it’s not really about fish at all.

Gimlette’s Newfoundland is a stage, a backdrop for successive waves of humanity living out their comedies and tragedies amidst the rock and cod. His Newfoundlanders exude histrionics at every turn. On the boisterous streets of St. John’s, where “drama .. tumbled out of people” taxi drivers soliloquize and bank tellers spin tales of giant dogs and mountainous snowdrifts. In the remote northern outports a fallen opera star once applauded on Europe’s greatest stages makes her way along the harbor. Dressed to the nines in pearls and silk she rides into town on a sledge pulled by her only remaining fan, a pet goat. (more…)

MISSION TO AMERICA by Walter Kirn

Reviewed by Ari Glogower

Walter Kirn’s latest work “Mission To America” ranges far and goes nowhere. This book, a protean mass of ill conceived images and half-baked humor leaves the reader aching for some tight, neat purposeful prose. The story line follows the adventures of two young men from a reclusive religious community tucked into a Montanan bluff. Their mission, to find new female converts to diversify the community’s inbred gene pool, results in many not-hilarious encounters with modernity and produces trite insights into overplayed themes of gender, commercialism and the like.

Kirn’s problem is not a lack of creativity, and he peppers each page with bizarre details and inventive asides. His description of the community, a new-age theocracy populated by Whole Foods brand reps, encompasses a colorful array of habits and beliefs. The reader meets the deity Lady Vegetalis and an economy based on the exchange of virtue coupons. The reader learns that once, during the spring moon of Snake Emergence the group’s leader Aunt Patricia – with a little help from Lom-Bard-Ok-Thon - halted an epidemic racing through the slums of northern Peru. And so on. (more…)

WALDEN by Michael Dolan

Reviewed by Toni Merriss

For many young adults, college is their first experience of truly being on their own. It can be a confusing time, full of doubts and a true sense of finding ones self.
In Michael Dolan’s first novel, Walden, the main character, Walden Walden XVI, has lived in the shadows of his entire family for as long as he can remember. Attending the same university that Waldens have for centuries does not help young Walden much in his journey to establish his individuality.

If there was ever a story of a predetermined path with no thought of how the actual person would respond, this is it. (more…)

DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER by Jeff Lindsay

Reviewed by Rebeckah Groves

Darkly Dreaming Dexter: A Daring Delve into Devilish Deeds

[Note: This review contains heavy alliteration. Not for the faint of heart. –Ed.]

Despite doubts that I had as to the decency of a drama dedicated to despicable dealings, Darkly Dreaming Dexter denied me the delight of dealing disparaging remarks to the book and deeming it dross. Instead, Dexter deftly demonstrates the destiny of the drama devoted to the decidedly devious: delectable, when done daringly. (more…)