Page 15 - Gears & Ears March 2015

Gears and Ears

Journal of the Rotary Club of Lake Buena Vista
Page 15
December 2014 March 2015
Page 15
This Month’s Book Suggestion

Satin Island - Tom Mc Carthy

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.

Select Reviews: Booklist: “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….This latest strange, smart narrative experiment showcases McCarthy’s gift for wildly original
fiction.”

Kirkus: “A dizzying take on possible conspiracies, corporate philosophies and one man’s idle thoughts….
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….the effort to follow its surprising routes pays off. “

Publishers Weekly: McCarthy’s newest novel is as delightfully unclassifiable as his last effort, C…
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.

Huffington Post: McCarthy’s latest novel hilariously, if sometimes too cynically, mocks the way we tell
stories today.

The Atlantic: Satin Island is the act of an artistic provocateur with an existential bone to pick. It cries out
in protest (albeit with a healthy sense of mischief) against the calcification of narrative art — a form that’s
been co-opted by corporate interests, which reshape culture to their own mercenary ends.”

Los Angeles Times: McCarthy’s style is at times reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s stories of
characters caught in the gears of consumer capitalism coupled with the whimsy of Jean Philippe
Toussaint’s literary situational comedies in which every detail is microanalyzed.