Imagine the place – the physical location – where you felt the most at peace. Now imagine having the resources to re-create that safe space. Who or what would you be willing to sacrifice in order to make that dream a reality?
This question is at the center of Tom McCarthy’s excellent first novel, Remainder. After selling out its initial run of 750 copies by a small Parisian press, Remainder found its way to England, where readers and critics became enamored of this eerie, absorbing book. In February, thanks to Vintage, Remainder finally came to the States. It’s better to not know too much about the plot before you read it, so I will just say this: after a mysterious accident leaves him comatose, the unnamed protagonist, a London resident in his thirties, has to re-learn how to live. To reroute his brain he must imagine performing each action before he does it. At the opening of the novel he has already mastered the mechanics of daily life, but the process has left him with a nagging dread, an unshakable feeling that nothing he does is quite real. And so our hero sets out to construct a world in which he can be authentic, free to move and speak without pre-meditation. How does he create such a world? As you might imagine, it takes a lot of money and a lot of people willing to play along. When certain people become all too willing to enact his fantasies, the scheme collapses on itself, spectacularly. By the time you realize the grim nature of the universe our hero has constructed, you’re already subject to its own looping, surreal laws.
McCarthy’s novel renders everything off-kilter: the physical world is laid bare to reveal all the connections and cogs that bind our minds to our bodies and our bodies to the world. These connections, once you really start to pay attention, are found to be unwieldy and untrustworthy. To say that the novel deals with the intersection of time, space, and memory sounds like the start to a droning academic essay, but McCarthy’s uncanny ability to immerse us in his hero’s psyche makes the book wildly interesting and frequently hilarious. Furthermore, I love the questions posed by the novel: what would you do if the hierarchy of your memories changed? If what you thought of as essential parts of yourself were suddenly stripped away and replaced with new memories? What would you do if you were granted the power to make all your dreams come true – and what might those dreams say about the kind of person you are? With perfect pacing, a mysterious, solipsistic narrator, and an increasingly ominous tone, Remainder reveals the high costs involved in making your dreams reality.
Recently released in paperback, Susanna Moore’s sixth novel The Big Girls probes deep into the lives of those who work and dwell in a women’s prison. It is a harsh, unforgiving environment most would probably prefer not to think about, let alone read about in grisly detail. No psychotic breakdown is too bleak, no rape too disturbing to recount in this tale of Dr. Louise Forrest, a prison psychiatrist; Ike Bradshaw, the ex-cop who guards the inmates and pursues the shrink; and Helen, the young woman condemned to the prison for murdering her two children. Dr. Forrest is new to the prison, and no one thinks she will last long. But the guards and inmates underestimate how essential the job is to Dr. Forrest’s healing of her own demons. If you’ve ever gone to a psychiatrist and suspected they might be even more messed-up than you are, you need only look to Dr. Forrest for proof. As we begin to understand her own fraught relationship with her eight-year-old son, her efforts to heal Helen start to seem increasingly futile and narcissistic. Just when you start to feel utterly claustrophobic watching these three alternately help, crave, and destroy one another, Moore introduces us to Angie, a vain young actress living in a different kind of hell: Los Angeles. Helen, who reads about her in a contraband celebrity glossy and becomes convinced the two have a special connection, seeks Angie out, and they take up a halting correspondence. Through her direct and eloquent writing, Moore pulls off the difficult feat of eliciting sympathy for all these characters without making them particularly likable.
If I were feeling charitable, I might say that Moore really likes doppelgangers and the possibilities afforded by having two characters with similar problems take divergent paths. In a less forgiving mood, I’d be inclined to say she just gives up midway through the novel and starts piling on the coincidences. I understand the appeal of these coincidences – something has to bind all four of these characters together – but I remain disappointed that Moore doesn’t trust her gift for story-telling enough to let the various storylines come together in a more natural way. Moore thankfully spares us from the kind of climactic redemption scene a lesser writer might indulge in while still demonstrating that the potential for growth remains alive in the characters. It is Dr. Forrest’s poor, neglected little boy who seems to emerge with the most hopeful future and the greatest capacity for change. This is as it should be: the story centers on the adults in the prison, but in its own way, it is a story about family, and the legacies children inherit. There is much attention paid to the family structures that spring up within prisons, and the ways in which the roles people take on inside the prison overlap with their familial duties outside it. Motherhood, in particular, takes a hit: for the women in The Big Girls, motherhood is a tense balance of devotion and revulsion, love and fear. The book’s ending does not live up to the potential of its first half, but The Big Girls is still a mesmerizing, chilling chronicle of the terrible things people do to one another and the desperate, imperfect attempts they make at retribution.
