Satin Island A novel

Review by New York Times Review

AFTER TRAVELING WIDELY throughout the world and studying its various peoples in all their kaleidoscopic glory, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structural anthropology, finally arrived at a dispiriting conclusion. "Mankind has opted for monoculture," he observed ruefully in "Tristes Tropiques," his classic 1955 memoir-cum-case study detailing his years spent among the indigenous tribes of Brazil. "It is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item." You know the saying: When modernity hands you monocultural beetroots, make lemonade. That's what U., the protagonist and narrator of "Satin Island," the smart, shimmering and thought-provoking new novel by the British writer Tom McCarthy, is attempting to do when we first meet him. U.'s flight back to London has been delayed, and so he's spending his airport captivity in as productive a manner as possible: watching people as they walk past him in the terminal, observing them as they browse the shelves of luxury-goods kiosks, surfing the web and occasionally glancing up at the TV screens overhead to glean cursory insight into the headlines. It's all in a day's work for the "in-house ethnographer" at a large, profitable and unnamed London-based consulting firm. "Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flip side of the habitual and the banal: Identifying these, prizing them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light - that's my racket," he tells us. U.'s firm is of the sort that can count among its clients not only multinational corporations but also their host governments; they come seeking expert guidance on how to "contextualize and nuance their services and products," how to "brand and rebrand themselves" and how to "elaborate and frame regenerative strategies." What they're really seeking, of course, is an inside track to the sublimated anxieties and ritualized desires of the billions of individuals that the new digital monoculture, foretold by Lévi-Strauss, has made into one big, happy, global family of consumers. For his part, U., a classically trained anthropologist rescued "from the dying branches of academia" by his company's charismatically Delphic C.E.O., is more than happy to oblige their requests, recognizing as he does that the market for his skills has shrunk a bit in the 80 years since Lévi-Strauss first disappeared into the rain forest. As he puts it, memorably and matter-of-factly: "Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: Corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe." Corporate clients, moreover, can apparently be dazzled into check-writing obeisance at even the subtlest invocation of highfalutin critical theory in support of their latest product rollout or marketing plan. Our narrator confesses to pilfering symbols from 20th-century French Marxist philosophers to sell a clothing-manufacturer client on the idea of a semiotic code embedded deeply within the creases and rips of distressed bluejeans. He's self-aware enough to note the delicious irony inherent in "feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine," but - at the beginning of McCarthy's novel, at least - he's no cynic. When U. is explicating, for a cereal maker, "the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it)," he's not playing subversive tricks: He sincerely believes his work can yield "not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents." Cynicism will come in due course - right after misgiving and trepidation, and right before apostasy. In the world of high-level consultancy, there are big gets and then there are Big Gets, of which U.'s firm has recently landed the biggest imaginable: the contract to work on a mysterious project so multivalent and overarching that it will, upon its completion, affect the lives of every human on the planet, by redesigning nearly every formal system that people have managed to put in place. In fact, U. tells us, the project (the details of which he's loath to reveal, for legal and contractual reasons) is already well underway by the time of his writing, or not writing, about it: "There's probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn't, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed," he discloses; "although you probably don't know this. Not that it was secret. Things like that don't need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring." As he and his colleagues work on the project, however, an increasingly troubled U. begins to have dream-visions of a sprawling, many-towered city being built in the desert by tens of thousands of antlike laborers: masses of people unable to envision the final result of, or even the pressing reason for, their labor - but whose faith in the task is nevertheless unshakable. McCarthy, whose previous books include a narratological analysis of the beloved "Tintin" children's series in a style reminiscent of critical-theory masterworks by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, isn't just a novelist: He's also well known in avant-garde artistic circles as a culture-jamming provocateur. With the English philosopher Simon Critchley, he has co-founded an organization, the International Necronautical Society, that combines hard-left politics with a winking, art-school knowingness and an open nostalgia for the bygone era of artist-led movements and rhetorically overripe manifestoes. That said, the 45-year-old McCarthy's sense of humor - which I'm happy to say is on full display in "Satin Island" - owes far more to the chilled satire of his wryly cerebral fiction-writing cohort, authors like Don DeLillo or Ben Marcus, than to the heated prolixity of a Tzara or Breton. McCarthy isn't a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he's a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful - in other words, compulsively readable. Of cultural critics past, McCarthy would seem to have more in common with Guy Debord, the 20th-century French theorist who coined the term "society of the spectacle" to denote what he saw as the commodification of authentic human experience as a function of late-stage capitalism. Many of the themes coursing through "Satin Island" - the mediation of our lived reality by corporate technocrats; the emergence of complex networks whose structures are unfathomable to us, even as we serve them and their hidden architects; the aesthetic and political triumph of the global monoculture (good call on that one, Monsieur Lévi-Strauss) - would doubtless get an affirming nod from Debord, who uncannily predicted the advent of our socially mediated universe of discourse when he noted, back in 1967, that "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." One can't help wondering what Debord, who died in 1994, would have made of the iWorld that we now inhabit, and that Tom McCarthy finds so darkly fascinating. It's a world where throngs of people will happily wait in line for hours to buy the newest iteration of a small device that gives them all of their news, keeps tabs on their friends and loved ones via third-party service providers, and entertains them with songs and games and videos even as it records (and stores, forever) their correspondence, their purchases, their comings and goings. Witnessing that strange spectacle, apparently, is reserved for the likes of U., and you and me. JEFF TURRENTINE is an editor at OnEarth magazine and a critic who writes frequently about fiction and music.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

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.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 coverincluding "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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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8. 8.1 And all this time, behind these apparitions, another one: the image of a severed parachute that floated, like some jellyfish or octopus, through the polluted waters of my mind: the domed canopy above, the floppy strings casually twining their way downwards from this like blithe tentacles, free ends waving in the breeze. This last picture, for me, produces, even now, a sense of calm: no angry and insistent tow, no jerks and tugs and stresses--just a set of unencumbered cords carelessly feeling the air. This sense of calm, of languidness, grows all the more pronounced when set against the panic of the man hurtling away from it below. He would have looked up, naturally, and seen the chute lolling unburdened and indifferent above him--as though freed from the dense load of all its troubles, that conglomeration of anxiety and nerves that he, and the human form in general, represented. Considering the picture, I found my focus, my point of identification within it and my attendant sympathy, shifting from the diminutive man to his expanded, if detached, paraphernalia. I felt quite happy for the latter, for its liberation into carefreeness. Parachutes, as a rule, are treated badly by their human masters: granted false release and then immediately yanked back into servitude, into yoked bondage. This one, though, had slipped the bridle--literally-- and billowed out into a freedom that was permanent and real. Its existence would have been a good and full one from this moment onwards.   8.2 The following weekend, the newspaper--the old-style broadsheet, I mean--carried a longer, more reflective article about the case. Its author was an occasional skydiver himself. He discussed the culture of the sport, its general fraternity. Sky- divers, he informed his readers, are a close-knit bunch. They have, he wrote, the feeling of being part of a tribe. This sentence jumped out at me, for obvious reasons; on reading it, I looked up at the byline, to see if I recognized the journalist's name. I didn't. I thought of my Vanuatans once again. In their tower- plunging ritual, the vines, as I mentioned earlier, were measured so as to tauten not in mid-air but rather only fractionally above the earth: the jumps deemed the best, the ones that won the diver most acclaim, were those in which the cords sprang into action as he hit the ground, plucking him back from the very jaws of death into which they'd tantalizingly allowed him, for a fraction of a second, to descend. On such perfectly realized jumps, the diver's shoulders would flick leaves and brushwood as they jerked back upwards, as though impudently scrawling the man's signature across the forest floor. The movement was extremely pleasing to observe. It was this act of scrawling, this graffiti-gesture, I now realized, that, above all other aspects of the ritual, had back then made me want to be a tower-plunger, or anthropologist, or both.   8.3 The article kept mentioning "faith." Skydivers are induced into and graduate up through a world in which faith plays a fundamental role. They must believe in their instructors; in the equipment; in the staff packing their rigs; in tiny ring-pulls, clips and clip-releases, strips of canvas, satin, string. It could be argued, wrote the author, that this belief had nothing of the devotional or metaphysical about it, since each of the things to be believed in had a solid evidential underpinning: the mechanics of a ripcord, say, or a spring-loaded riser--or, of course, on a larger scale, the overall infallibility of physics, its laws of resistance, drag and so on. Yet, he claimed, these things could only carry one so far towards a gaping hole in a plane's side, and the fundamentally counterintuitive act of throwing oneself through it: to cite the clichéd but apt maxim, they could take the horse to water, but they couldn't make it drink. That final spur, the one that carried skydivers across the threshold, out into the abyss, was faith: faith that it all--the system, in its boundless and unquantifiable entirety--worked, that they'd be gathered up and saved. For this man, though, the victim, that system, its whole fabric, had unraveled. That, and not his death, was the catastrophe that had befallen him. We're all going to die: there's nothing so disastrous about that, nothing in its ineluctability that undermines the structure of our being. But for the faith, the blind, absolute faith into whose arms he had entrusted his existence, from whose mouth he'd sought a whispered affirmation of its very possibility--for that to suddenly be plucked away: that must have been atrocious. He'd have looked around him, seen the sky, and earth, its landmass and horizon, all the vertical and horizontal axes that hold these together, felt acceleration and the atmosphere and all the rest, the fundamental elements in which we hang suspended all the time, whether we've just jumped from an aeroplane or not-- and yet, for him, this realm, with all its width and depth and volume, would have, in an instant, become emptied of its properties, its values. The vast font at which he prayed, and into which he sank, as though to re-baptize himself, time and again, would, in the blink of a dilated eye, have been voided of god- head, rendered meaningless. Space, even as he plunged into it, through it, would have retreated--recoiled, contracted, pulled back from its frontiers even though these stayed intact-- withdrawn to some zero-point at which it flips into its negative. Negative world, negative sky, negative everything: that's the territory this man had entered. Did that then mean he'd some- how fallen through into another world, another sky? A richer, fuller, more embracing one? I don't think so. Excerpted from Satin Island by Tom McCarthy. Copyright © 2015 by Tom McCarthy. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from Satin Island: A Novel by Tom McCarthy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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