In the final part of the interview, author Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature) talks about the publication of his debut novel Remainder and the International Necronautical Society.
(Read Part 1 and Part 2)
Raincoast Blog: Remainder has had an interesting route to publication. How did you end up at Metronome Press and how did Alma Books come into the picture?
Tom McCarthy: I finished Remainder in 2001, but the conglomerates wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. To be fair, some editors pushed quite hard, but couldn’t get it past their marketing departments, acquisition boards, whatever they call the ones who actually call the shots. So I involved myself more with art projects for a while - art projects which were actually literary projects in disguise. The art world is very literate. Virtually no one I met in publishing in the UK had actually read much literature beyond contemporary middle-market stuff, but artists, curators, critics and so on are super-literate. Some of them were even doing work based on the writings of Beckett, Huysmans, Robbe-Grillet and so on. So I found a kind of refuge in that arena. And it was in that arena that I met Clementine Deliss, who set up Metronome Press with Thomas Boutoux. They’re both curators and critics, and they wanted to do a project around the legendary Olympia Press, which operated out of Paris in the 50s and 60s and published (in English) people who the conglomerates also wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole: Beckett, Burroughs, Trocchi, Nabokov, people like that. Olympia was very tied in with visual art, and with soft porn, and Metronome Press wanted to emulate that - re-enact it, you could say. So in late 2005 they published my book and three others, plus ‘Teasers’ that had erotic imagery from contemporary artists alongside excerpts from the books. They were determined that this was an art project, not a publishing one. So when Remainder was getting big press reviews and the UK chain stores were asking for it, they still only distributed it in art galleries and institutions. Then Alma came into the picture and produced a mass-market edition in 2006.
RB: Are you glad Remainder wasn’t taken up by a large publisher in the UK, or do you just think about the millions that you could’ve made?
TM: Funnily enough, as I was signing up to Alma after the good reviews and the general buzz, one of the biggest of the bigs, who’d rejected it on two separate occasions before, came running in trying to gazump them, offering my agent I don’t know how much. We were like: ‘It’s the same book now as it was then. F*** you.’ You’ve got to work with people who actually support what you want to do, or it’ll all go wrong a year or two down the line. I’ve signed with Vintage in the US, but that was because they came across it, tracked down Metronome (which wasn’t easy) and took it on their own initiative. The Editor-in-Chief, Marty Asher, said to me: ‘I don’t know if one hundred or one hundred thousand people will like it as much as I do, and I don’t care. It’s what I want to publish.’ And he can: he’s got the power. He’s like a fairy godmother. So’s Clementine Deliss. And Alma. I wonder how many other serious novels there are out there that haven’t found fairy godmothers yet. I’m lucky. Three years is nothing.
RB: What are you working on now?
TM: I’m editing the manuscript I wrote before Remainder, Men in Space, which Alma will bring out next spring. It’s a novel about disintegration set in Prague during the break-up of the former Eastern Bloc. And I’m working on a new novel called C, about technology and mourning.
RB: I came to your artwork relatively late. Could you explain the International Necronautical Society to me?
TM: The INS is a construct, a cultural fiction that gets played out in both virtual and real spaces. It’s got the bureaucracy of a Kafka novel (committees, sub-committees, sub-sub-committees), the political austerity of Stalinist governmental bodies (denouncing enemies and former members, issuing proclamations and so on), the cultural bombast of early twentieth century avant-gardes (it was launched with a manifesto very much modeled on the Futurist one of 1909), and the subversive viral energies of Burroughs and Debord (we infiltrated the BBC website a few years ago, inserting INS propaganda in its source code which only a network of a few hundred people could access). The INS is most visible when we hold Hearings, interrogating other artists and writers in front of press and public, publish reports or let public spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London host our FM broadcasting units; but it’s operative all the time, everywhere. We are all necronauts - always, already.
RB: I get asked this all the time by people in the book industry, so I am going to ask you - were you tempting fate by calling the book ‘Remainder’?
TM: Remainder is the right title. It’s about aftermaths, residues, what’s left when everything else has been said, shown, repeated, taken away. In terms of the book industry it’s the right title too: it was left behind, but it’s still there.
Reviews of Remainder:
Ready Steady Book
The Midnight Bell
Other interviews with Tom McCarthy:
3AM Magazine
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
