What should one expect from the debut novel of the "General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semifictitious avant-garde network," an organization whose manifesto claims that "death is a type of space"?  A copiously detailed semi-realistic avant-garde meditation on the physicality of mortality, perhaps? Tom McCarthy's debut novel, Remainder--a work of labyrinthine ambition--may be just that.  It knowingly twists and turns in search of something, relentlessly driven forward (as if by a credo), undaunted by the hints of thinness in the thread it grasps. The result teeters on gimmicky, but is rescued by the brilliantly entrapping finesse with which it is executed.

After a vague but traumatic accident ("It involved something falling from the sky"), Remainder's nameless British narrator is thrust into the world anew, his memory damaged by the falling objects ("Technology. Parts, bits.") that inexplicably hit his head.  In winding spare prose, he explains that he must relearn simple tactile movements and slowly summon shards of memories to piece together a life.

So he does--and without too much trouble, it initially seems.  It may take a week to learn to pick a carrot up from a plate ("we went back to the backboard, factoring in the surplus signals we'd not factored in before, then back through visualization, then back to a real carrot again,") but in the end he succeeds.  And with the accident and settlement behind him, this recovered amnesiac begins to return to the fragments of his former life.  His trusty Fiat is parked outside.  His drinking buddy, Greg is ready for a pint.  Catherine, a lively American he befriended in Paris, has dropped by London for a visit.  He has reclaimed basic mastery of his body and mind, and--after the settlement--is eight and a half million pounds richer.  London is waiting. But what sort of life is left? Not much of one, he reports: "So I was bored--by people, ideas, the world: everything."

With Catherine boarding a plane--with nary a kiss goodbye!--and Greg's jokey monologues relegated to the answering machine, it's just the narrator and his Fiat left.  Not surprisingly (and rather conveniently for the reader), in this vacuum, the workings of the narrator's mind--and more specifically, his memory--are amplified and imbued with new layers of meaning.  Studiously picking over his memory, the narrator dredges up--and proceeds to pore over--traces of his lost past and the fresh residue of new experiences alike.  He becomes devoted to savoring these perceptions.  Suddenly realizing that he has the time and money to do more than simply play scenes in his mind, he hires re-enactors to stage the content of his daily brushes with reality.  Employing a driven, logistics-minded manager named Naz, he begins to turn an obsessive eye upon his most mundane experiences. 

It starts with a hand-picked three million pound renovated apartment building, furnished--by his new-found wealth--with precise figures. These are tenants who already occupy his mental landscape: A pianist stumbling through Rachmaninov by day and testing tentative compositions by night, an old lady cooking liver at all hours, a man endlessly tinkering with his motorcycle, and others.  They are all paid exorbitant sums to putter about at his bidding, playing and replaying moments as he sees fit.

These handcrafted moments have a euphoric effect on him.  After a carefully choreographed exchange with an elderly neighbor taking out the trash, he gushes, "For a few seconds I felt weightless--or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time.  My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it--gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water.  It felt very good."  What transcendent garbage!

Obviously this narrator is not the first to use control and repetition to seek the sublime through projects which:

all had the same goal, their only goal: to allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us--and nothing separating me from the experience that I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing; no detour.

This is the territory of monks and artists, and by their standard, there's something impressive--if not quite pious--in the doggedness with which the narrator stays his course.  At first, the consequences of living an enforced waking dream are off-kilter but harmless--cats falling off rooftops, a patina of liver-fat glazing the building, and a concierge in an ice-hockey mask can all be written off mere inconveniences to existential experimentation.  But with time, the narrator's thirst for sensory distillation only increases.  He re-enacts an afternoon when he has a tire changed.  Again and again.  He re-enacts a local shooting.  And again, in slow-motion. He re-enacts the planning of the re-enactment of the shooting.  And still the itch persists! With the widening of the plot's simple spiral, the novel grows darker.

"Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it," insists the trusty adage.  McCarthy holds a prism to this phrase, refracting it into slivers when one of his characters paraphrases it: "If you don’t want to repeat things, you have to understand them."

"But I do want to repeat things," the narrator blithely retorts.  "And I don't want to understand them."

What's driving the narrator at first is a yearning for authentic experience; later, it is a strange, life-defining addiction.  As marvelous of a spectacle as McCarthy sets up, his real genius lies in his ability to ensnare the reader in his narrator's machinations.  Through the wonky zen of his narrator's logic, McCarthy manages to spin the reader himself into the fabric of the plot.   The novel's redundancies are lucid and methodical, kaleidoscopically contorted like the workings of the narrator's mind.   Following the plot--turning each page--becomes an act of complicity. McCarthy makes it clear that at the heart of the maze, of course, lurks a grotesque beast.  His success lies in luring the reader to press on.