"Humming wires and buzzing switchboards"

If you've never read Tom McCarthy, start with "C."

Good morning, and welcome to Issue 7 of Writing About Reading. I hope this newsletter greets your inbox like a warm pair of slippers or a steaming mug of coffee.

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I’m currently reading Inside Story by Martin Amis (pseudo-memoir packaged as novel) and Shakespeare in a Divided America (fascinating new non-fiction). What are you reading? Last time, many of you answered that question directly to me, which was fun, but feel free also to leave it as a public comment on this post. Perhaps we can create a little community here.

My last edition was about dogs in fiction. This week—in the spirit of not always needing a news peg here as an excuse to discuss a certain book—let’s get weird.

When people ask me my all-time favorite books, I usually forget to list Tom McCarthy’s 2010 novel C, but it’s one of the most memorable reading experiences I’ve ever had, and it’s one of the few books I’ve reread a second time. I’m not a big rereader—there are too many books I haven’t read, so rereading feels like taking up a precious spot for something new. (Off the top of my head: The Secret History, Ender’s Game, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Art of Fielding, Invisible Man, The Pale King, and Union Atlantic are the only books I can think of that I’ve read multiple times.)

I also don’t typically love historical fiction. (Notable exceptions: The Wolf Hall series by Hilary Mantel; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.) C is a bildungsroman set against the backdrop of WWI, so it may look like a historical novel, but the time period is just a clever backdrop for this brainy postmodern book.

C tells the life of Serge Carrefax, born on an England estate (“Versoie House”) just before the start of the 20th century. (His name is pronounced like “surge,” and with good reason, though when I first saw it, I assumed it was “Sergey.”) 

Serge emerges from the womb covered in a caul, an omen thought to be good luck. (David Copperfield did too: “I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.”) Serge and his older sister Sophie grow up on the grounds of their father’s school for deaf children—they are not deaf, but their mother is—and they act in elaborate plays that their father orchestrates. The siblings are creepily close (think of Benjy and Caddy in The Sound and the Fury), and what happens to Sophie leaves Serge with stomach issues, serious sexual hangups, and a total disregard for his own life.

Serge’s first obsession is radio. He stays up late playing with a short-wave radio, listening to communications from ships, thinking about signals, beeps, buzzes, the noise of the world. This creates an obsession with insects, a source of natural buzzing, as opposed to man-made hums and whirs. His strategy whenever he and his sister play The Realtor’s Game (a fictional stand-in for Monopoly) sets the tone: “He’s always keen to buy the Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company, despite its poor yield, sold on visions of humming wires and buzzing switchboards, of connections.”

Sophie, too, becomes obsessed with connections. In an Ophelia-like scene, she tells Serge, “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. It’s all connected. I feel it inside me.” Later, inside his bomber plane in the sky, Serge will have a similar thought: “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.”

Even for a novel with so much plot (Serge goes to a spa in Germany to cure his constipation, in the novel’s Magic Mountain section; becomes a bomber pilot in the war; gets addicted to heroin in London; and works as a code-breaker in Egypt), the language is what stands out most. Its lexicon is that of non-living things, of machines and gears and wires and whirring. (Harper’s compared C to Ulysses, which is high praise, but C is never difficult for the sake of being difficult.)

McCarthy adheres religiously to the language of machinery and mechanics, even in a pivotal scene in which Serge, in WWI, gets gunned down and falls out of the sky: “The plane hits something, but it’s not the ground: it feels more like a buffer, a soft boundary… He can feel this texture all around him too—see it as well: it’s silken, swirling about his shoulders and enveloping the whole machine, thin fibres at its rear expanding and contracting… Within its canopy, the humming of the plane’s struts and wires is amplified and softened… the sound fades out and there’s nothing.”

That’s a moment of violent physical action (a plane crashing), but McCarthy never even says overtly that the plane crashes. Instead we get machine language. (Radiohead could provide a perfect soundtrack for this book.) When Serge wakes up on the ground, “there’s brown fabric covering his vision.” Again: the synthetic, the artificial. It’s his parachute, but we’re meant to think of his caul. When he notices that his co-pilot Gibbs died in the crash (“stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit”), the scene reminded me of Snowden’s death in Catch-22 (Yossarian sees Snowden’s intestines spilling out), but only for a second, because Serge, unlike Yossarian, is completely unmoved by the sight and instead ponders the mechanics of how the German man they hit, as their plane crashed, died: “He must have jumped from his burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally—or, rather, on a diagonal descent—dragging him with it.”

We’re always in Serge’s brain, and it is an unfeeling place. He’s more taken with science and the world around him than with people. I could almost see the book getting assigned in high school lit classes, and students writing papers analyzing what exactly is wrong with Serge, a “man without qualities.”

When Serge is a prisoner in a German war camp, a fellow prisoner, Hodge, asks him what will happen to them, and Serge answers glibly, “I imagine we’ll be shot.” Indeed, the next morning, they are led outside and brought to a clearing. Hodge is “gone white” with fear. Serge comments casually, “A pleasant location.” I laughed out loud.

In the book’s funniest scene, Serge exposes to his pseudo-girlfriend Audrey that a local psychic, Miss Dobai, is a fraud. He does it using (what else?) wireless tech and radio signals. The psychic, in her show, speaks letters aloud, one by one, as though receiving them from the beyond, an assistant writes them on a big board for the audience to see, and they form messages. When Serge discovers how she’s doing it, he hijacks the process:

“I’ve got ‘DOBAI IS FRAUD,'” the secretary says, taken aback. “Who’s saying this? Where are you?”

UPMISSDOBAISCUNT, Serge dictates… AUDREYITSMESERGE.

“I think we should curtail this session,” announces the master of ceremonies. “Miss Dobai is clearly…”

But he’s lost control of the procedure. Serge moves in for the kill: TABLECONTROLLEDBYMANINFEDORA.

It’s bizarro humor. There is an absurdist element to C that I love.

Another example: When Serge crashes in a race car, he lands upside down in the road with the vehicle on top of him, trapping him, and as people gather around and try to help, he declares, from beneath the car, to no one in particular: “My own crypt,” and then, “It won’t come off… it’s my carapace.” (Another insect reference, and another caul reference; also hard not to think of “The Metamorphosis” there; and for some reason, I hear Serge saying this like Will Ferrell in the “I can’t control the volume of my voice” SNL bit.)

I’ve made it this far without even mentioning Remainder (2005), McCarthy’s first and best-known novel.

I read C before Remainder, but once you’ve read both, you see how Remainder laid the foundation for C, and how certain threads run through both, even though Remainder is in a totally different, minimalist style, as opposed to C’s Pynchonian maximalism.

Remainder is about a man who wins a ton of money in a legal settlement from an accident that left him with severe memory loss. He decides to spend the money on hiring actors to stage reenactments of bits and pieces he recalls from his past. Eventually he begins reenacting the reenactments, and the novel doubles on itself. It’s clever and strange and hypnotic. I liked C better, but it was fun to see how C bears Remainder’s influence.

Consider this from C, which sounds a lot like the reenactments of reenactments in Remainder: “Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as… pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it.”

And when Serge meets a tourist in Egypt, who tells him: “I looked at the Pyramids, and tried to revere them, and photographed a little. Then I looked at the others looking at the Pyramids, and photographed these people too.”

You can see how the threads that McCarthy explored in Remainder led him to C. Take this, from Remainder: “I came across some men laying wires beneath the street and stopped to watch them for a while… for me, they were… gods, laying down the wiring of the world, then covering it up—its routes, its joins.” I can imagine that very sentence giving McCarthy the seeds of C.

Tom McCarthy is a writer whose work encourages rereading. (I liked, but didn’t love, his 2015 novel Satin Island, and if you’re a Tintin fanatic, you must read his lit theory book Tintin and the Secret of Literature). With his best two novels, one informs the other, and vice-versa, doubling back, repeating on themselves, duplicating, circling, buzzing, like Serge’s wires and radio calls.

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