(This is the second part of a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy. To listen to Part One, go here.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Baffled by French artistic references.

Author: Tom McCarthy

Subjects Discussed: Guns and weapons, the smell of cordite, authenticity, Remainder‘s protagonist as revolutionary, the ethical imperative of bearing witness, Antonioni’s films, Andy Warhol, Lockean nouns, the central axis of art, philosophy, and literature, Stanley Milgram’s experiments, Jeremy Deller’s reenactment, The Cramps, prisoner reenactments of the “Thriller” video, the common motif of the Michelin Man within Remainder and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Tristram Shandy, the bid to be authentic, author intuition and ambiguity, reenacting a bank heist, Bob le Flambeur, Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory, Dog Day Afternoon, bubbles, wine and dinner, the Blueprint Cafe, visualizing a carrot, Samuel Beckett, Giambattista Vico’s idea of history running in loops and its influence upon Finnegans Wake, the lineage of repetition, Shakespeare and plagiarism, mainstream publishing remaining in denial about modernism, hooking up with Clementine Deliss and Thomas Boutoux, Olympia Press, Deliss’s distinction between art and mainstream publishing, middlebrow novels, and inventing meaning from simple form.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

McCarthy: I mean, lots of critics have seen Remainder as a sort of postmodern parable. Or a parable of the postmodern. That history’s ended and we’re just a chain of repetitions. And it’s all to do with digital culture. And so on. And so on. But if you look in literary history, you get exactly the same logic played out in Don Quixote, for example, where Don Quixote reenacts — literally reenacts! — stylized moments from penny novels that he’s read in a bid to be more authentic. In Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne, Uncle Toby has lost one of his testicles in the Battle of Namur. And so he spends his whole retirement gardening. And he lays out the flowers in his garden in the exact position of the soldiers of the battles — so the red flowers are like the British and the blue flowers are the French, or whatever it was. You know, even Hamlet sits around doing nothing for half the play and then hires these actors to literally — to reenact his father’s death scene in front of the whole court. There’s this kind of awkward moment. So I think you find these patterns played out, right back to the beginnings of literature almost. I mean, I suppose the most contemporary or modern version of it, and one that was very much on my mind when I wrote the book, was Ballard’s Crash, which is a fantastic book, and its hero again reenacts car crashes, reenacts stylized violent moments, in a bid to be authentic. Ballard makes it very, very clear. He says the only real thing in this world is the car crash. And therefore we must reenact it and create the perfect one.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

(This is the first of a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy. To listen to Part Two, go here.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering whether he may be a reenactment.

Author: Tom McCarthy

Subjects Discussed: Really good rhubarb tarts, cappuccinos and loyalty cards, the relationship between caffeine and psychosis, repetitive patterns, writing a book with the maximum number of ambiguities possible, cracks in the wall, unintentional allegory, writing Remainder in three drafts, J.G. Ballard and the “Eureka!” moment, the illusion of a brisk read, weird guys at bars, modulating dialogue, the clues within Remainder that it’s set in the late ’90’s to 2000, accidental interpretations of post-9/11 commentary, Time Control UK and concierge companies, speculation, the protagonist looking up at the heavens, the morphine hit of authenticity, empathy, the invented moment with the homeless character, post-traumatic stress disorder and shell shock, responding to trauma, ethics, examining the character of Naz and examining the World War II references, the fascism of reenactments, loyalty, Melville’s racism, the aesthetics and the rebellious temperament of the pianist, the sophistication of Tintin, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” colons and Graham Greene, the $8.5 million sum and eight symbols throughout Remainder, the councilor and his failure to use second-person in conversation with the protagonist, the proprietary nature of pronouns, Kafka’s “The Burrow,” David Lynch and “looking at yourself from the outside,” the royal we, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, James Ellroy, McCarthy’s love for the blue, the Blueprint Cafe, idealist philosophy vs. the materialist tradition, Naz’s tendency to look up words on his phone, setting rules on perspective, the protagonist’s obsession with time and space, tingling and electricity, the Freudian connection with trauma, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and the relationship between neurosis and neoliberalism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

McCarthy: These concierge companies were just emerging in the UK who would more or less do anything for you. They sort of lived your life vicariously, or they stretched your life for you. Which I just find kind of fascinating. I mean, it’s quite kind of metaphysical, really. It’s like you outsource your godliness. You outsource your autonomy. Even though you’re paying them. And the stock market was — I just found it really fascinating. This bubble and these companies that were just making paper millionaires out of people that had virtually no premise. Like eSolutions. I mean, what on earth is that? (laughs) I read this article about the South Sea bubble of the 17th century — or was it the 18th century? When stocks were going so high that people would throw money at anything and there was a company called A Very Good Idea Yet No One to Know What It Is. And its shares sold out in a day. And of course it went bankrupt six months later. But I guess in this book, the movements of capital are very much tied into the movement of everything else. So there’s this very idea of speculation, which has an astronomical meaning as well. Constellation of the heavens. And my hero spends a lot of time just looking at dust. Constellations of dust suspended in a stairwell. And they’re either going up or down. And the shares are doing the same thing. I mean, their speculation is about projecting futures, keeping shares buoyant, and at the end, both the dust crashes and the shareholders crash and everything crashes.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Just hours before 2006 NBA finalist Jess Walter headed on a plane back to Spokane, we talked about his novel, The Zero, which he fully confesses to be an allegory of post-9/11 life.

Walter: We were clinging to our economy, and the fact that our leaders — Giuliani and Bush at the time — said they attacked our economy. They attacked our way of life. And the fact that we didn’t bat an eye over the fact that they equated our economy with America, with our way of life, it was as if we had forgotten that there was some larger thing. And then, as we started debating whether or not it was okay to torture, and this lurched into a war that I didn’t agree with, it just seemed as if the conflation of victim and hero, the confusion of economy and country, were disastrous. And so, it comes out in a novel.

Correspondent: But it’s not all bad. You have, for example, the honor of the tip. The dollars constantly inserted under the martini glass.

Walter: Right.

Correspondent: So I don’t think it’s entirely a cynical view you have of the..

Walter: No, no. I’m not entirely cynical. Again, this is all — I sound so dour and political. But this is all framed in a novel that’s hopefully funny and entertaining. And I remember those ghost bars being in Lower Manhattan. I mean, I was right in the thick of Ground Zero. So you’d walk into these ghost bars and there’s no reason for firefighters not to take the bottle down and take a drink. And some of them would leave a dollar tip. Was that an ironic tip? Was that a real tip? I don’t know. But the descriptions of Ground Zero in the book. In my mind, the book starts when I arrived five days after. And so, from that moment on, it does hopefully capture everything. Some honor, some pathos, and a lot of cynicism.

Correspondent: The whole notion of Jesus being mentioned 93 times in the Koran. Where did that come from?

Walter: Jesus is mentioned 93 times in the Koran.

Correspondent: It really is?

Walter: It really is. If you think about the history of religion in our world and all these pantheistic movements, and all these animism and natural worship, to all of a sudden come up with monotheism with gods that are almost exactly the same, with some of the same prophets, but just these tiny gradations of difference — to have those cause the death and destruction of millions upon millions of people and lead us to the brink of mutual destruction over a couple of degrees, it’s another kind of insanity. These religions are so incredibly similar. And within the differences, obviously, are enough places for all of us to die and the fundamentalists are the one who cling to those differences.

This morning, as the man was midway through packing his carefully prepared clothing and about to check out of his hotel, Ken Kalfus was generous to take some time out of his schedule to talk with me about his book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. His novel, which blissfully assaults the “irony is dead” conventions of post-9/11 life, began from a short story. Kalfus is now working on short stories, but it’s just possible that, in his concern for words and language, he’ll find that grand idea that will translate into a third novel.

(And, incidentally, Kalfus will be reading with another 2006 National Book Award finalist, Jess Walter, tonight at Bookcourt at 7:00 PM.)

A good part of our conversation was concerned with the following passage, which Kalfus agreed was one of the key galvanizing points for Disorder:

But Joyce felt something erupt inside her, something warm, very much like, yes it was, a pang of pleasure, so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger. It was a giddiness, an elation. The deep-bellied roar of the tower’s collapse finally reached her and went on for minutes, it seemed, followed by an unnaturally warm gust that pushed back her hair and ruffled her blouse.

Correspondent: So, in this case, it looks like you have long sentences. But they resemble short sentences by way of the comma.

Kalfus: You know, you want these words to go off in the reader’s head in a certain way. You really do. I mean, that’s what you’re trying to do when you write. And sometimes, you do that with commas. Or you do that with sentences. You do it with colons. Semicolons. Whatever it takes, you do.

Correspondent: Is it largely intuitive? This rhythm that you’re looking for. How much of it is planned through kind of a psychological approach? Do you test this kind of thing on other readers?

Kalfus: No, no, no, no. But there’s a lot of rewriting. I can’t say. If I were to look at it again, I might want to change something in that sentence. It sounded pretty good when you read it. It’s partly intuitive. And then you write it down and it looks like junk. And then you rewrite it again. You know, you go over and over and over it again. So the process is making these sentences work. And, quite frankly, I’ve discovered that’s maybe the easiest thing — the most pleasurable thing about writing — is getting those sentences right. It’s a lot of work, but in a way, maybe it’s the easiest thing. Because you can always tinker with it, tinker with it. Plot and character are actually more — are probably the big things that are more demanding when you’re plotting or you’re putting it out. Making sure that the major parts work. Dealing with sentences, you can always rewrite those little sentences. But once the story gets locked in, it’s hard to shift things.

Correspondent: So, for you, the sentence is more of the motivating factor than the actual plot and the character…

Kalfus: You know what. I can’t answer for everybody. I think we write because we love language. Was Shakespeare really obsessed about Denmark? About succession in Elsinore? Or fathers and sons? He had some ideas for some great lines. And he found a story that he could use. But I think all of us come to writing for the love of language. And the stories come after that. There’s a story when I write a book or a project. But I saw a way of using language in a way that was interesting to me.

Correspondent: Well, that’s a good point. Because people remember Twelfth Night not really for the plot, but “If music be the food of love, play on.”

Kalfus: That’s very awkward to compare myself to Shakespeare.

Correspondent: I’m sorry about that.

Kalfus: But I see an opportunity to use language when I write.