Satin Island: A novel

Image of Satin Island: A novel
Release Date: 
February 17, 2015
Publisher/Imprint: 
Knopf
Pages: 
208
Reviewed by: 

“McCarthy uses his intelligence, wit, and skill to lead us deeper into the networks of the contemporary.”

Tom McCarthy’s new novel is not as sure of its identity, generically, as its subtitle claims—and this is a good thing. In fact, although “A Novel” remains most prominently on its cover, a number of other possibilities can still be seen crossed out (or “under erasure,” as the philosopher Martin Heidegger might have put it: neither fully present nor wholly absent)—these alternative generic possibilities include “A Treatise,” “An Essay,” “A Report,” “A Manifesto,” and “A Confession.” Each describes some aspect of what is contained in the pages that follow.

This kind of experimentation will not come as a surprise to readers already familiar with McCarthy’s books, which include the novels Remainder and C as well as a nonfiction study, Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Indeed, McCarthy is one of the few English-language writers working today who can generate works of literature that combine the adventurous pleasures of experimental fiction with the immersive illusion of the traditional realistic novel.

In Remainder, the protagonist works unceasingly to attempt to recreate every detail of an accident he cannot fully remember; in C, a more ambitious if also more conventional novel, a family of inventors and savants muddles through the middle decades of the 20th century, occasionally bound by little more than their affection for the titular title letter.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature is a quasi-academic study of Hergé’s beloved comic strip that builds on the literary theories of Roland Barthes to argue, in effect, that meaning emerges from the interaction between text, language, and reader, not from the author himself.

A similar message is conveyed in McCarthy’s most recent foray into nonfiction, an essay entitled Transmission and the Individual Remix,  the very title of which adapts T. S. Eliot’s famous modernist manifesto “Tradition and the Individual Author” for our viral times.

Even if you’re already prepared for the unexpected when you pick up a new novel by Tom McCarthy, however, Satin Island will surprise you. To start with, as hinted by one of its erased subtitles, the experience of reading Satin Island is more like perusing a philosophical treatise than a novel: each paragraph is numbered within each chapter, and one gets the sense of tracking an analytical exposition as much as following a narrative. You may find yourself recording, for example, that you have reached “section 5.4,” rather than realizing that you are a third of the way through the novel.

McCarthy’s experimentations with the limits of novelistic representation go well beyond questions of format. As in Remainder, Satin Island’s protagonist remains virtually anonymous; here, he goes merely by the initial “U,” which simultaneously alienates ad pulls us in, since “U” is of course “you” too.  

As for its plot, Satin Island is again more like Remainder than like C (or like McCarthy’s first novel, Men in Space, which revolves around an art heist): McCarthy is more interested in seeing how much psychological and socio-political interest he can generate by tracing the minutiae of his protagonist’s daily life and thoughts than in concocting exciting or even particularly memorable outward actions or events.  

There is, in fact, an unusual backstory at the heart of Satin Island—although it most directly concerns U’s lover, Madison, rather than U himself. Even if I wanted to tell you more about U’s activities, however, I wouldn’t know what to say—and this may be precisely McCarthy’s point regarding the difficulty of making a straightforward narrative out of our modern lives, along the lines of the questions asked by Eliot’s famously alienated narrator in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Then how should I begin/ To spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways?/ And how should I presume?”  

Here’s what I can tell you. I can say that U is employed as an “in-house ethnographer” at an unnamed, trendy, London-based but highly globalized consultancy firm. The official work that he has been hired to do concerns something called “the Koob-Sassen project,” which everyone speaks about in hushed tones and nobody seems to understand completely.

The real purpose of U’s employment, however, has been revealed to him by the Company’s chief guru—an aptly named fellow of great energy and uncertain origin named Peyman—as something different: to write “The Great Report,” the anthropological analysis of our times that will be the last word on the contemporary.

Does U succeed? Do we ever find out what “the Koob-Sassen project” really entails? If the answers to these questions matter to you, then Satin Island may disappoint.

McCarthy’s new novel teases around the edges of the global conspiracy thriller, in which our hero discovers something rotten at the core of a seemingly benign multinational corporation, bank, or other institution, and duly exposes it at risk of life and limb. But let’s face it: the odds on U or I (or you) really playing such heroic roles are very long indeed; there are too many interests at stake, too many rules to interpret and follow, too many layers of mediation between the players of the game and the results of their play, fair or otherwise.

And even if it were possible to assign a secret value to every sign in circulation in a given system, like U’s hero—the real-life, 20th century anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss—tried to do as his life’s work, who is to say that the meanings seeming to issue from the system are not simply induced in the mind of the interpreter, rather than somehow revealed by it?

A protagonist suited to our globalized era can no longer be depicted as exploring a labyrinth, slaying the monster at the center, and then following a golden thread to return, triumphantly, to the world outside. Instead, he or she—like the rest of us, like U—is enmeshed in a network of ever-shifting relations and assemblages, ones that stretch, reproduce, and shift in seemingly infinite ways as goods, money, and above all information are endlessly exchanged.

McCarthy knows that in exploring this idea he is following in the footsteps of other great experimental writers who have adapted their style and content to reflect the tenor of their ages: Kafka, Woolf, and Borges come to mind most readily in this respect.

But give credit where credit is due—especially since a credit card turns out to play an integral role in Satin Island’s penultimate pages. Rather than use his fiction to pretend to carry us out of the labyrinth of the past, McCarthy uses his intelligence, wit, and skill to lead us deeper into the networks of the contemporary. Readers willing to follow him will be rewarded for their efforts, if not in the ways they have come to expect from most novels.