New York Times Review:
September 8, 2010
Code World
By JENNIFER EGAN
C
By Tom McCarthy
310 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of the 20th century on a rural English estate. Serge’s father, a manic tinkerer with early wireless technology, runs a school for the deaf but seems oblivious to his own deaf wife, Serge’s mother, who’s so blinkered on opium (supplied by a mute gardener who grows the poppies himself) that she nearly lets Serge drown in a creek at age 2. Serge’s beloved older sister, Sophie, becomes sexually involved with a friend of their father’s and winds up committing suicide at 17 — possibly after having an abortion. Serge’s relationship to Sophie is preternaturally close, with incestuous overtones, and her death severs his only real human connection. But these dramas are merely suggested, their shadowy outlines ignored, sublimated or flat-out denied by those involved; Sophie’s self-poisoning is deemed an accident.
McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream. We follow Serge to a spa in or near Germany (where he goes to recover from bowel problems after Sophie’s death) to the killing fields of France (where he drops bombs on the Germans during World War I) to the interwar underbelly of London (where he nurtures a heroin habit among a demimonde of performers and spiritualists) to post-independence Egypt, highly suggestive of present-day Iraq, where he works in “communications,” ostensibly helping to erect a wireless radio system but also possibly doubling as a spy. What drives Serge isn’t love or friendship or even survival (born with a caul, like David Copperfield, he is sustained by a run of exceptional luck). He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of *Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.
Throughout, “C” evokes the communications frenzy of a century ago, as well as our own. Here is Serge as a young teen*ager, at the start of World War I, turning the dial of his wireless transmitter in search of signals:
“The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. . . . Above 650, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, aurora borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.”
Later, while dropping his first bombs from a fighter plane, Serge experiences a heady sense of convergence. “Whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.”
For all of Serge’s lust for coherence, “C” (a nominee for the 2010 Man Booker Prize) raises apt questions about the moral and mental hazards of seeking double meanings from the external world. Widsun, the family friend who seduces Serge’s sister, is a government official specializing in encryption, and his affair with Sophie begins with his teaching her, against her father’s wishes, to crack coded newspaper messages arranging trysts. Sophie’s suicide is presaged by a hallucinatory state in which she imagines confluences all around her. “He’s done stuff to me,” she tells Serge of her anonymous lover. “I can see things. . . . When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments. . . . In London, *Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me.”
Serge’s own sense of meaningful connection is keenest when he’s on heroin, but his addiction nearly kills him, and his preference for patterns over people dehumanizes him; he likens the men he shoots from the air to singed insects, and becomes sexually excited while mowing them down. As for the spiritualists, their vain hope that wireless communication can reach the dead fuels seances run by opportunistic frauds (ironically, using wireless transmission to pull off the hoax), one of whom Serge spectacularly unmasks.
McCarthy’s prose strategy in “C” is not far from Serge’s druggy reveries — he aligns disparate things into larger patterns full of recurring images: analogies between the human body and earth, and machinery; hums and whirs; film screens; bowels and tunnels; electric circuits; cauls and other silken membranes. These repetitions come to feel like the articulation of a larger code — as if, were readers to plot their exact positions throughout the novel, they would discover a hidden message. The sense of being prepped for a vast interpretive task is heightened by the large quantities of information that Serge (and the reader) is asked to ingest, imparted by family members — Sophie on natural history, his father on the need for the deaf to vocalize — and then by a series of interlocutors who appear in the novel briefly, for the sole purpose of education: on the nature of bowel blockage and auto*intoxication; on the challenges of trying to capture combat in visual art; on the history of Alexandria as a communications hub; and assorted other topics. These lectures drag despite their thematic relevance; they feel artificially planted and, at times, alienatingly technical, as in this exchange between Serge and an engineer charged with filming the sounds of battlefield explosives:
“ ‘So the strings are time, or space?’ Serge asks.
“ ‘You could say either,’ the man answers with a smile. ‘The filmstrip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.’ ”
McCarthy clearly knows that the lectures are a risk. He describes the last of Serge’s educators, an archaeologist’s assistant with whom he has a fling in Egypt, thus: “Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth — constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise.” Having established Laura’s monotony, McCarthy continues to quote her at length, interspersing her bulletins on ancient Egyptian burial practices with the archaeologist’s drunken recitations from The Book of the Dead. It’s as if he can’t resist telling us one more thing, suggesting yet another iteration or echo or metaphor, so we’ll be fully equipped to appreciate the wild, cumulative, synchronized outpouring he’s prepared for us. And indeed, the culmination of “C” so powerfully ratifies its audacious architecture that it justifies the occasional longueurs of getting there.
Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
Jennifer Egan’s new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” was published in June.
September 8, 2010
Code World
By JENNIFER EGAN
C
By Tom McCarthy
310 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95
There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of the 20th century on a rural English estate. Serge’s father, a manic tinkerer with early wireless technology, runs a school for the deaf but seems oblivious to his own deaf wife, Serge’s mother, who’s so blinkered on opium (supplied by a mute gardener who grows the poppies himself) that she nearly lets Serge drown in a creek at age 2. Serge’s beloved older sister, Sophie, becomes sexually involved with a friend of their father’s and winds up committing suicide at 17 — possibly after having an abortion. Serge’s relationship to Sophie is preternaturally close, with incestuous overtones, and her death severs his only real human connection. But these dramas are merely suggested, their shadowy outlines ignored, sublimated or flat-out denied by those involved; Sophie’s self-poisoning is deemed an accident.
McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream. We follow Serge to a spa in or near Germany (where he goes to recover from bowel problems after Sophie’s death) to the killing fields of France (where he drops bombs on the Germans during World War I) to the interwar underbelly of London (where he nurtures a heroin habit among a demimonde of performers and spiritualists) to post-independence Egypt, highly suggestive of present-day Iraq, where he works in “communications,” ostensibly helping to erect a wireless radio system but also possibly doubling as a spy. What drives Serge isn’t love or friendship or even survival (born with a caul, like David Copperfield, he is sustained by a run of exceptional luck). He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of *Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.
Throughout, “C” evokes the communications frenzy of a century ago, as well as our own. Here is Serge as a young teen*ager, at the start of World War I, turning the dial of his wireless transmitter in search of signals:
“The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. . . . Above 650, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, aurora borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.”
Later, while dropping his first bombs from a fighter plane, Serge experiences a heady sense of convergence. “Whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.”
For all of Serge’s lust for coherence, “C” (a nominee for the 2010 Man Booker Prize) raises apt questions about the moral and mental hazards of seeking double meanings from the external world. Widsun, the family friend who seduces Serge’s sister, is a government official specializing in encryption, and his affair with Sophie begins with his teaching her, against her father’s wishes, to crack coded newspaper messages arranging trysts. Sophie’s suicide is presaged by a hallucinatory state in which she imagines confluences all around her. “He’s done stuff to me,” she tells Serge of her anonymous lover. “I can see things. . . . When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments. . . . In London, *Stamboul, Belgrade, everywhere,” she says. “It’s all connected. I feel it inside me.”
Serge’s own sense of meaningful connection is keenest when he’s on heroin, but his addiction nearly kills him, and his preference for patterns over people dehumanizes him; he likens the men he shoots from the air to singed insects, and becomes sexually excited while mowing them down. As for the spiritualists, their vain hope that wireless communication can reach the dead fuels seances run by opportunistic frauds (ironically, using wireless transmission to pull off the hoax), one of whom Serge spectacularly unmasks.
McCarthy’s prose strategy in “C” is not far from Serge’s druggy reveries — he aligns disparate things into larger patterns full of recurring images: analogies between the human body and earth, and machinery; hums and whirs; film screens; bowels and tunnels; electric circuits; cauls and other silken membranes. These repetitions come to feel like the articulation of a larger code — as if, were readers to plot their exact positions throughout the novel, they would discover a hidden message. The sense of being prepped for a vast interpretive task is heightened by the large quantities of information that Serge (and the reader) is asked to ingest, imparted by family members — Sophie on natural history, his father on the need for the deaf to vocalize — and then by a series of interlocutors who appear in the novel briefly, for the sole purpose of education: on the nature of bowel blockage and auto*intoxication; on the challenges of trying to capture combat in visual art; on the history of Alexandria as a communications hub; and assorted other topics. These lectures drag despite their thematic relevance; they feel artificially planted and, at times, alienatingly technical, as in this exchange between Serge and an engineer charged with filming the sounds of battlefield explosives:
“ ‘So the strings are time, or space?’ Serge asks.
“ ‘You could say either,’ the man answers with a smile. ‘The filmstrip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.’ ”
McCarthy clearly knows that the lectures are a risk. He describes the last of Serge’s educators, an archaeologist’s assistant with whom he has a fling in Egypt, thus: “Laura lectures Serge on Osiris, the information streaming out like a strip of punch-card paper issuing from her mouth — constant and regular, as though, by rubbing her forehead, she had set her exegetic apparatus at a certain speed from which it wouldn’t deviate until instructed otherwise.” Having established Laura’s monotony, McCarthy continues to quote her at length, interspersing her bulletins on ancient Egyptian burial practices with the archaeologist’s drunken recitations from The Book of the Dead. It’s as if he can’t resist telling us one more thing, suggesting yet another iteration or echo or metaphor, so we’ll be fully equipped to appreciate the wild, cumulative, synchronized outpouring he’s prepared for us. And indeed, the culmination of “C” so powerfully ratifies its audacious architecture that it justifies the occasional longueurs of getting there.
Still, the book’s lingering resonance owes less to its strenuous intellectual girding than to the mystery the story nonetheless retains. Like life, which we overinterpret at our peril, this strange, original book is — to its credit — a code too nuanced and alive to fully crack.
Jennifer Egan’s new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” was published in June.
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