Satin Island

November 17, 2014
McCarthy’s newest novel is as delightfully unclassifiable as his last effort, C. The narrator is U., a fanciful and probing anthropologist who works for a corporation he refers to simply as “the Company.” Recruited as an ethnographer on the reputation he earned through his published study of nightclub culture, U. has been commissioned by his boss, Peyman, to write what he calls “the Great Report”; but U. can’t seem to get started or be sure if he’s necessarily even working on the Great Report at any given moment. Though he associates with people who have consequential experiences (his friend Petr dies of cancer) his thoughts are more often occupied by abstract concepts, images, patterns, and theories. U. is intent on making connections and creating meaning from the information he takes in, to the point where he begins to compile dossiers on various topics including parachute accidents and oil spills. His ultimate goal is to combine all of these together into a “Present-Tense Anthropology.” The book itself subtly takes the form of his Great Report, with U. often addressing the reader, and is marked by fascinating philosophical tangents that justify the apparent lack of a story. This novel of ideas is begging to be read and reread for meaning with pens, diagrams, and maybe even a dossier or two thrown in for good measure.

December 1, 2014
A dizzying take on possible conspiracies, corporate philosophies and one man's idle thoughts.The basic ingredients of McCarthy's new novel suggest a Don DeLillo-like look at academic theories and the rigors of contemporary life or perhaps a globe-trotting thriller in the vein of William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. McCarthy, whose earlier novels Remainder and C eluded easy descriptions, certainly seems to be laying the groundwork for this in the novel's early pages. Its narrator, known only as U., is an anthropologist who made his name a decade ago after writing a highly regarded academic study of dance music. "Once, for a brief time, I was famous," U. writes, but he then goes on to clarify that it was a very specific, very niche variety of fame. This doubling back happens again and again: At one point, U. gives a short lecture, then dedicates much more time to an imagined version of how the same event could have gone. And while there are events here that could form the core of a more traditional narrative, including the illness of a colleague of U.'s and a series of mysterious deaths that occur while parachuting, U. continues on his way, sometimes oblivious and sometimes obsessed. As the crossed-out subtitles on the cover-including "An Essay" and "A Treatise"-suggest, this is a malleable work, one where dreams of unreal cities carry as much weight as impressions of real ones and where a long discussion of the way Starbucks operates in Seattle may be a key image or a complete digression. There are moments of devastation here, and the way McCarthy reveals them are among the novel's highlights.McCarthy's novel is thought-provoking and sometimes frustrating; adjusting to its unexpected rhythms takes time, but the effort to follow its surprising routes pays off.

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February 1, 2015
McCarthy, author of three previous novels, including the Man Booker Prize finalist C. (2010) and the manic Men in Space (2012), tightens up his offbeat style in his slimmest novel to date. The narrator, a corporate anthropologist known only as U., has been granted free rein to devise a Great Report for his employer, the Company, an influential PR firm led by jet-setting, visionary executive Peynman. The subject of U.'s report is nothing less than the totality of the current era, the trends, behaviors, and cultural markers that define the times. As U. struggles to begin work on the document, he obsesses over seemingly disparate subjects: the suspicious circumstances of a skydiver's death, Vanuatu cargo cults, and a recent offshore oil spill. The book's long, numbered paragraphs mimic academic writing but give way to humorous accounts of U.'s romantic exploits, detailed tangents on the properties of petroleum, and flights of delusional grandeur, as anxiety mounts over whether his ambitious project will ever find its shape. This latest strange, smart narrative experiment showcases McCarthy's gift for wildly original fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

McCarthy's C was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2013 he won Yale's Windham-Campbell Prize for literary achievement. So the cognoscenti will be looking for his latest, another ruminative mind-bender whose narrator begins reflecting on all that is veiled and ungraspable in life after spotting the Shroud of Turin on his laptop while waiting for a plane.

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