Symbolism and a man called U: more avant-garde fiction from Tom McCarthy

In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction, comparing it favourably to Joseph O’Neill’s lush Netherland, which she deprecated as incarnating the worst delusions of realism.

Funny how rapidly Smith’s distinction has disintegrated: McCarthy’s latest, Satin Island, bears an uncanny similarity to O’Neill’s recent novel The Dog. Both are narrated by an affectless young male professional known only by a single initial (X in the case of O’Neill, U in McCarthy’s); and both dramatise the moral and intellectual contortions imposed by commercial environments on people whose sympathies are with the left.

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U is a corporate anthropologist — such people do exist; I’ve worked for one —tasked with unpacking the symbolic meaning of everyday objects and behaviour, with the assistance of an arsenal of continental theory, in order to help brands sell things more effectively to consumers. So a commission for Levi’s jeans — whose founder just happens to share a name with the demiurge of modern anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss — offers the chance to invoke the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the ‘rip’ to comprehend slashed jeans as bearing the ‘birth-scars of their wearer’s singularity, testaments to the individual’s break with general history’.

Making your lead character a man who interprets everything might seem a cheat for generating the matter of a novel, but McCarthy is, mercifully, restrained; he is far more interested in the unassimilable and the mysterious. His employer has saddled U with two substantial pieces of work: the Koob-Sassen Project, which U can’t speak about for reasons of commercial confidentiality; and the Great Report, an interpretation of the entirety of modern culture that has been commissioned by his boss, possibly as a joke. He struggles with the latter for obvious reasons.