Satin Island, Tom McCarthy
Reviewed by Brendan C. Byrne.
Several reviews of Tom McCarthy‘s fourth novel Satin Island pull-quote the early parenthetical, ‘events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now’ while neglecting the fact that, actually, quite a lot happens in the book. Its anthropologist-narrator, U., works for a company he’s legally bound to only refer to as the Company (its logo a ‘giant, crumbling tower’), much as the narrator of McCarthy’s breakout novel Remainder is legally prevented from speaking about an inciting accident. The Company has just won a contract called the Koob-Sassen Project, which is never described but permeates all of contemporary existence. U.’s position as ‘in-house ethnographer’ consists mostly of ‘feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine.’ (It’s no accident that Satin Island shares its initials with the Situationist International.) As opposed to the recent fiction of William Gibson, where the vanguard is the corporation and theory is just a hangover from ’68, McCarthy doesn’t cast the Company as some kind of transcendent novum. Instead, as with Remainder, the sublime is closest in immanence, and U. spends most of the novel sitting and staring at screens, walls, or people repeatedly performing the same actions, letting his thoughts trickle over such subjects as oil spills, his hero Lévi-Strauss, and a global conspiracy to murder parachutists. These meandering spells are the action which takes place on page, while off it Koob-Sassen slowly tendrils into the lives of everyone on the planet, U. shifts from catastrophic professional failure to glittering success, and a great deal of parachutists die. Quite a bit, in fact, happens, it’s just that the action on the page rarely meets the action off it.
