So, like so many amnesiacs before him, our narrator decides to reassemble his life. He talks to friends, watches his old memories as they come back to him like episodes of a soap opera: "It hadn't been particularly exciting," he said, glimpsing his life as it comes back in installments, "in fact, it had been quite mundane." As in the best amnesiac stories, McCarthy holds this wry, deadpan tone cleanly throughout. He helps things along by picking out just the right amount of detail. The action clearly takes place in London, but the city isn't described well—just a few details: a coffee bar, the man's block, the people he knows.
This lends an eerie eternal present-tenseness to the action that becomes more significant as the story progresses. No matter how hard the man tries, he cannot regain those moments of past pleasure. He decides he needs a full-scale immersion in the pastness of the past. And what happens from there is one of the most bizarre fictional stories to come across this reviewer's desk in years.
Slowly, methodically, then with increasing franticness, the man decides he'd like to reenact parts of his life. He starts big, buying a building and redecorating it so that it looks exactly like one he once lived in—right down to the scuffed floors, the chipped paint, even the cats that walked across the roof. He then hires actors to reenact the roles played by his neighbors: the handsome man fixing his motorcycle, the old woman cooking liver, the pianist forever making mistakes.
Set into this motion, the building becomes the hero's real-life memory palace; a dollhouse of sorts, with McCarthy's hero dictating all the players' movements. McCarthy has struck just the right sort of matter-of-fact tone to pull off this bit of quirky plotting. The world has recently been reassembled for his hero, and so McCarthy's prose feels that way, too.
Traveling around London, looking for things, having experiences, then deciding they need to be reenacted, McCarthy's hero achieves what the Buddhists call a state of mindfulness. Since he has relearned how to walk, talk, even lift a pencil, McCarthy's narrator is hyperaware of every sensation or ripple caused his movement. The present is one giant bolt of texture, and all "the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from being alive" has been removed.
In an odd way, then, his coma and emergence from it are his true settlement—the money is simply a giant tool, but a very helpful one at that. It allows him to have almost no friction with the world. If he wants something done, McCarthy's hero simply hands the doing over to a firm he has hired to get things done. Meanwhile, the man creeps ever closer to "ground zero of perfection," when one stops "being separate, removed, imperfect."
And yet, the harder McCarthy's hero tries to maintain this state, the more elusive it becomes—the more artificial, bizarre and ritualized his life becomes. In a very subtle way, McCarthy is saying something about our attitude toward pleasure. Fleeting moments no longer count; we have to have the best all the time. Then we discover the pursuit of this goal turns our lives robotic, fetishistic.
Remainder was originally published in Paris in a limited run by an art-house press, a provenance that calls to mind that great other Parisian novel about memory: Proust's In Search of Lost Time. "The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic," Proust wrote, "the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills up what remains."
Remainder imagines a world in which habit isn't what remains: Sadly, weirdly, sometimes beautifully, it's all there is for its poor hero. In Tom McCarthy's hands, it also makes for an unforgettable story.