Then We Came to the End v. Remainder
presented by
ZOMBIE ROUND
Then We Came to the End
v. Remainder
Judged by Rosecrans Baldwin
TMN Co-Editor in Chief Rosecrans Baldwin lives in Paris, France. He co-founded The Morning News with Andrew Womack in 1999 and has been waking up at 6 a.m. ever since. His personal web site is useless. Someday his ashes will be tossed off Mount Desert Island. His stories have elsewhere appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He also used to write a column for Travel & Leisure Golf, having played golf once, and a column for American Express’s Black Ink, a private magazine for the wealthy, despite his lack of wealth. Connections to this year’s competitors: “Occasional emails with Jonathan Lethem, otherwise nada.”
A note from the ToB staff: Last fall we asked TMN readers to submit their favorite books of 2007. That list was one of the factors we used to choose the 16 books that ultimately made the Tournament. Now we’re going back to our readers’ favorites one more time.
Fourteen novels have been eliminated from the Tournament so far. From those books we’ve rescued the two that were best loved by TMN readers last year—Remainder and The Savage Detectives—and brought them back in a pair of resurrection duels we call the Zombie Round. In order to get to the finals, Ferris and Diaz will each have to get past a book left for dead: a book that’s hungry for brains.
One of these books I couldn’t stop reading. One I liked a lot, but I could have put it down halfway through. One surprised me for how gripping and otherworldly it was, without giving away the gears. One impressed me with its handiwork, but I was filled more with respect than excitement in the end.
Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End is terrific: humorous and wistful, a touching book about people who work together in an advertising office. It is completely true in my experience. It is very well written. It is so shrewdly structured, I would be flipping back through the pages to see where the trick was. And I love Ferris’s timing, and how much time he takes to observe the articulations of an exchange. Lots of funny parts, lots of great lines; I laughed out loud when a character only spoke with Godfather dialogue. And when I turned the last page, I was sad to let it go, even if it never really gripped me.
McCarthy’s Remainder is dull and plodding for the first 60 pages, and then: blast off. I couldn’t stop reading. It is such a weird novel, I don’t know who I’d recommend it to. There ain’t much in the way of character development, emotional hand-wringing, relational crises, etc. Instead it is so obsessed with its subject, which is its main character’s subject, which has something to do with how we make ourselves seamless with the universe, that I bet either you’re addicted like I was, or you hate it. But sincerely and unexpectedly, I was hooked. I was reading in the street, reading like it was the most interesting thing I’d ever read, and it was, for about two days. I still think about it, which I can’t say for Then We Came to the End.
To their weak points, Ferris’s book is written in the “we” form, which has the communist effect of equalizing all the characters while rendering them each less unique. Remainder, on the other hand, has very little obvious art in the line (to my mind: A-plus!), but it also stinks of great meaning—where everything appears to be significant on an interplanetary scale, but the author just doesn’t want to come out and say why exactly.
I can already smell the hate mail. In the end, one I liked and respected and highly recommend, and the other one I just loved like crazy. Zombie voters, we march in step to the finish line. McCarthy to the finals.
Advancing:
Remainder
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
KEVIN: Oh, the Rooster is a fickle mistress. Actually, the Rooster is less a fickle mistress than it is a sleazy photographer boyfriend who promises the snaps he’s taking on his camera phone are both arty and private and then waits for you to make it big before releasing them on the internet to embarrass you or, in the event that you don’t make it big fast enough, to embarrass Lindsay Lohan.
The actual Lindsay Lohan, on the other hand, if she happened to be your mistress (which, considering how much she drinks, is not all that far-fetched), would be pretty fickle, I bet.
John, you and I are both big fans of Then We Came to the End, but every time it advanced in this competition one of us, you or I or the judge, marveled at how well its obvious artifice worked on us. I suppose it was inevitable that the book would eventually run into a reader for whom it worked not quite as well, at least, in this case, as it compared to Remainder, which I haven’t yet read.
The Brit McCarthy had lots of supporters, however, and they are no doubt in the streets tonight, tipping Mini-Coopers and spray-painting the Remainder colours on posh shop windows and phone boxes. The BBC will be full of hand-wringing, wondering what has happened to today’s youth, and suggesting that they read too many novels and have too easy access to aerosol paint. It’s like a Bill Buford book out there, or a Who rock opera. I’m boarding up the windows and fleeing on my Vespa.
JOHN: I think what’s clear is that both of these books were successful at fulfilling their own ambitions. Even in the second round, when judge Mark Liberman found Remainder more toxic than the bottom of Dennis Rodman’s old gym bag.
What this shows is that, just like our N.C.A.A. basketball inspiration, it’s not the seeding that matters, but the match-up. The second-seeded Duke Blue Devils went down to the lower-seeded West Virginia Mountaineers not because of the seeding, or because God hates preppy private universities that provided the inspiration for I Am Charlotte Simmons, but because Duke’s post-play is softer than Michael Moore’s back fat and the Mountaineers have some space eaters in the middle. End result: 18-5 domination on the offensive boards and massive tooth gnashing by Duke graduate brother.
(Sorry bro, Duke sucks.)
Unlike the semis, where the match-up went Ferris’s way against Tree of Smoke, McCarthy’s Remainder found its ideal audience in our TMN patron, Rosecrans Baldwin. You’ve got to feel bad for Ferris, given that his book won more match-ups than any other in the tourney thus far, receiving props even in defeat, but that’s just the way the Rooster rolls.
Remainder, a truly odd book that no one is quite clear exactly why they like, now faces the ultimate test in the finals as it meets our full judging panel. You’ve got to put it as the underdog against either of the potential other finalists, but zombies are notoriously hard to kill.
Unless you have fire.