Wow this character was up himself! ( )

Meh.
Really wasn't feeling this. I wasn't feeling this so much I thought it was me, that maybe it's just not what I need to read right now. Maybe it's not my taste.
I have no idea, because I started skimming. And I felt like I missed nothing. ( )

kinda reminded me of "pattern recognition", but not as "cool" ( )

I give this book one star as a desperate cry for attention, which I figure is okay, since the book's blurb describes SI as "an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world" and suggests that in this book McCarthy "captures--as only he can--the way we experience our world." Take that, entire rest of the world!

Of course, the blurb is in part a joke, because the book's main character, U., is meant to write a report that is about everything--that will "name the world we live in"--for a rich business tycoon. And my one star is in part a joke, because it might also be a five star book.

How is this possible, you ask? Well, I have two readings of this book. In the first (one star), this is just another self-indulgent piece of flatulence, only yet more cliched than the self-indulgent flatulence that preceded it. I had repeated flashbacks to the '90s--here we have an anthropologist who apparently got his PhD without ever reading anything other than Levi-Strauss (compare: a biologist who still believes in genetic determinism); we have a lot of stuff about masks and performativity; he quotes Deleuze and Badiou as if they were fresh meat; he doesn't quote, but uses concepts from, Lacan; the novel draws false analogies between constructedness and fictiveness; IT BRINGS UP AND MISUES SCHRODINGER'S POOR ABUSED CAT [at this point my notes consist of the all-caps exclamation REALLY DUDE?!]; it quotes sous les paves la plage; like '90s theory it mistakes easily dissolved fallacies to produce apparent paradoxes (if a skydiver dies because the cords to his parachute were cut, when was he murdered? Incipit pages of guff); it acts as if writing was an act of oppression against the material world (words pollute us just like oil pollutes oceans!); it frets about the way media and the internet have changed everything (please ignore actually existing suffering and injustice); it somehow manages to imply that Mallarme was a totalitarian; it is a paeon in praise of trash and excrescence.

It does all this in what appears to be our new normal form: juxtapositions of random images that are meant to produce meaning. You may have experienced this as "modernism." But now, for some reason, it's freighted with all kinds of revolutionary freshness. McCarthy's images, fyi, are Staten Island, anthropology, material culture, oil-spills, the dead parachutist, media images of crowds, the Mallaremean 'book,' sex with a woman called Madison, Leibniz, pomo theory, corporate speak, Vanuatu, the Shroud of Turin, the internet, and cancer. It ends, of course, in New York. Thank you Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, et al.

Now, note "sex with a woman called Madison," because this where the book *might* get interesting, though no reviewers have picked up on this. The above list of cliches might have been produced by a random literary novelist who didn't bother to read anything and thinks he's being original. But introducing a woman who, for three quarters of the novel, does literally nothing other than be inseminated is simply not done any more, and McCarthy knows this. True, at the end of the book Madison confronts U. with the fairly trite observation that ideas aren't as important as, you know, actual suffering.

It is impossible to believe that McCarthy would willingly write a book so cliche-ridden as to include the girl who's up for anything sexually, and doesn't bother to, you know, talk or anything. And this leads me to think that the book's best scene is also the key to unlocking its secret. U. imagines giving a speech at a conference, where someone accuses him of aestheticizing of pollution. U. shouts down this dissenter, and it's quite funny.

But imagine for a second a writer so brave, so reckless, that he would actually write a spot-on parody of almost all of his time's most tiresome literary tropes. That he would do so with almost no sign whatsoever that he intended the book to be taken as a parody, except for this lone dissenting voice and the curious absence of one particular literary trope, viz., the excellent insistence that female characters be something other than sex toys. Why, I wonder, did McCarthy miss this one, even as he produced so much uncertainty, media fluff, internetism, and definitively boring theoretical goop? Could it be that McCarthy intentionally wrote a *terrible* novel, including a reckless act of immorality (i.e., objectifying the only woman in the novel) as a sign that he *knew* it was a terrible novel? Could it be that this is the best worst book ever written, a marvelous literary polemic taking aim at everything horrible in 'high-brow' literary writing, including the "now our hero comes into contact with other people and doesn't have to think about them anymore" conclusion?

I hope so, because otherwise this is just an even worse version of what everyone else is doing. ( )

There is something oddly reminiscent of Italo Calvino in this book. Of Wittgenstein too - the structure, the apparent argumentation, towards an insight. Phenomenology as well in that perception is key to understanding. And Claude Lévi-Strauss. Yeah, this is a novel, about a man trying to make sense of his life/work/world. And ending up not in Staten Island. Has all the reality of a dream sequence, of life lived slightly askew from our own narratives of self. Worth a look I think. ( )