Tom McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, is one of my all-time favorites. Nothing else he has written comes close to it. The essay collection Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish is my first look at his non-fiction work.
Taken together, the essays form a full-throated defense of high modernism, of the sort epitomized by Ulysses and attempted by McCarthy in his novel C. He argues that these works reflect reality better than "middlebrow fiction" with its conventions of naturalism and authenticity. "The twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteenth-century realists ever did." I can see many of the obsessions that underlay Remainder.
McCarthy makes his points clearly and effectively. Unfortunately, though, those points tend to reiterate fairly standard critical insights about the constructive nature of all reality. McCarthy's main subjects are the canon of modernism and pre-modernism (Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Proust, Tristram Shandy), and his arguments summarize the giants of critical theory (Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes). The essays about other art forms (Gerhard Richter, David Lynch) apply the same principles.
The only time I felt like McCarthy enhanced my appreciation was his two discussions of Zinedine Zidane. In addition to an alluring description of the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, he cites the French writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint talking about the infamous head butt:
Taken together, the essays form a full-throated defense of high modernism, of the sort epitomized by Ulysses and attempted by McCarthy in his novel C. He argues that these works reflect reality better than "middlebrow fiction" with its conventions of naturalism and authenticity. "The twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteenth-century realists ever did." I can see many of the obsessions that underlay Remainder.
McCarthy makes his points clearly and effectively. Unfortunately, though, those points tend to reiterate fairly standard critical insights about the constructive nature of all reality. McCarthy's main subjects are the canon of modernism and pre-modernism (Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Proust, Tristram Shandy), and his arguments summarize the giants of critical theory (Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes). The essays about other art forms (Gerhard Richter, David Lynch) apply the same principles.
The only time I felt like McCarthy enhanced my appreciation was his two discussions of Zinedine Zidane. In addition to an alluring description of the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, he cites the French writer Jean-Phillipe Toussaint talking about the infamous head butt:
Like everyone else in the ground, the author missed the incident itself (it took place off the ball), but saw it on the replay screen: always-already mediated, even for those present. ... Zidane, who had announced prior to the game that it would be his last ever, wanted...to stop the ninety minutes running their full course, to short-circuit finitude itself.
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