Remainder is a brilliant book for an open-minded book club. It is endlessly suggestive and does not provide a tidy resolution, which guarantees that the conversation will never flag. Readers who insist on realism or closure will hate the book, but readers who tune into its wavelength will have plenty of material to chew on. Remainder got me thinking about big questions — What is the difference between reality and a simulation? What makes an action authentic? Can you plan to be un-self-conscious? — and always made me feel tantalizingly close to a profound insight.
As a result of his mysterious accident, the narrator feels “neutral” and disoriented. His physical therapy “rerouting” makes him feel that his actions take a “detour” through intellectual understanding and that they are less authentic as a result. He wants to become engaged again, to return to a time when his actions were “perfect, seamless.” We can all empathize with this goal, can’t we?
The re-enactments are his attempt to re-engage. They actualize the mental processes we all go through when we want to understand something: We go over and over it in our minds, looking at the situation from different angles. What made me feel the way I did? What could I have done differently? We slow down key moments to give ourselves time to react. We imagine improved scenarios and hope for the opportunity to bring them to reality. The narrator may be insane, but there is a method to his madness.
The precise details of the narrator’s mental state are odd, compelling, and frequently hilarious. He insists on an exact use of language, and his word choices provide clues to what he is thinking. For example, when talking to his stockbroker, he likes the “exposure” of taking a “position” because it allows him to “speculate,” which he understands to mean ‘seeing, as from a watch tower’. The words suggest how his crazy investment strategy comes from the same impulse as his need to “concentrate on the overhead terrain” when riding the subway and to imagine the network connecting his phone to his lawyer’s office. His glee when he fills up his coffee-shop loyalty card seems related to his appetite for repeating re-enactments.
The story itself offers several explanations for why the narrator acts like he does. Doctor Trevellian suggests that he is compelled to return to the source of his trauma. The short councilor likens the re-enactments to shamanistic magic. The narrator himself talks about becoming “merged with the space around him, ... and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them.” Each explanation captures something intriguing, but none give complete understanding. Fitting the pieces together is a fascinating puzzle.
It feels like all these stimulating ideas fit together, but it’s hard to say exactly how. The result, for me, is a tingling not unlike what the narrator feels at critical moments. He re-enacts those moments to explore their “intense significance.” As a reader without eight and a half million pounds, I re-enact them in my mind for the same reason.
In his first re-enactment, the narrator tries to recapture the secret of feeling authentic, without the “detour” through his intellect. He vividly remembers the feeling and sets out to recreate the situation that caused the feeling. In the course of the re-enactment, he slows the action down to give himself time to concentrate on the critical moments, much as the piano player slows down as a means of correcting his errors.
He re-enacts the incident at the tyre shop for two reasons. First, the boy fixes his tyre with the un-self-conscious authenticity that the narrator wants to achieve. Secondly, his visit ends with an apparent miracle wherein matter – which he has called his nemesis – is transubstantiated and disappears. Is it possible that reality can be overcome in this way? When it turns out not to be a true miracle, the narrator finds it “very, very sad” on a cosmic level. During the re-enactment, he tries to reconfigure the action so that the miracle really does take place.
The re-enactment of the shooting is also doubly motivated. The original event takes place at the same location where he first felt the intense and serene feeling. Furthermore, he sees the shooting victim as a fellow victim, one who perfected his role. Was there a way for the shooting victim to escape his fate? When did he know he was doomed (p 214)? These questions clearly relate to the narrator’s accident, and it is during the shooting re-enactment that his most vivid memories return (p 230).
The location of the shooting was also the scene of a police siege about a year previous, and our narrator was dismayed by the lack of evidence of the event. (Page 10: “if you’d arrived three minutes later you wouldn’t have known anything had happened, But it had. There must have been some kind of record…”) Is he lamenting the lack of a record of his accident, which he can’t remember and is not allowed to discuss? The shooting, by contrast, has a detailed forensics report. The diagrams in the report seem to have great significance and to strip away the surplus matter.
The bank robbery re-enactment is not really a re-enactment per se (although the narrator insists on calling it one when the short councilor says he will “simulate” the robbing of a bank [p 259]). The idea derives from the narrator’s realization that he was “least unreal” when he was asking for change in front of Victoria Station (p 44 and 241). My interpretation is that he felt most real then because he performed an authentic action and then interpreted it rather than vice versa. His interpretation is that he felt most real because he was asking for money he didn’t need. He combines this idea with the interest in guns that he gained during the shooting re-enactment.
When he meets his robbery advisor, The Elephant’s description of the art of bank robbery excites our narrator because it sounds so much like a re-enactment or forensic study. The inevitable transition from re-enactment to real robbery is triggered deftly by The Elephant’s casual comment about “pre-enacting.”
The climax of the book is the moment when the robbery goes wrong, and one of the re-enactors realizes, “It’s real!”
The narrator finds the idea of vaporizing airplanes “beautiful” for the same reason he loved to the miracle of the disappearing fluid in the tyre shop. He refers to the event as “dehiscience” (p 276), which I learn from the dictionary means ‘the natural bursting open at maturity of a fruit or … the bursting open of a surgically closed wound.’ What could be more perfect? The book closes with the possibility that the narrator’s airplane will crash to the ground, taking us back full circle to the accident, with the narrator now playing the part of the falling debris.
One suggestion for reading the book: Look for those times when the narrator feeling the tingling and ask, why does he feel the tingling now? What is causing it?
What is the significance of the title?
On page 91, the narrator remembers an art teacher saying, “Your task isn’t to create the sculpture, it’s to strip all the other stuff away, get rid of it. The surplus matter” (p 91). Elsewhere, such as on page 17, he describes matter as his “nemesis.” Later in the book, he becomes fascinated with models and forensic diagrams, which attempt to extract the meaningful relationships in a situation. All of which leads me to believe that “remainder” is what is left over after the surplus matter has been removed, which is to say that it is the critical core of a situation. Or, in its beautiful ambiguity, it is the surplus matter itself.
What would you do if you had a ridiculously large amount of money?
Wouldn’t you try to put yourself in a situation where you’d feel happy?
Why does it matter that the pianist is playing a tape and not performing live (p 158)?
Because his playing is not real, and we all find it important to know that something is real, even if a simulation would give us the same sensory experiences. (Cf. brain in a vat; the Matrix) This element of being real appears later in the story: when the boy at the tyre shop insists he is real (p 168, then in the re-enactment on 177), and at the climax, where the Robbery Re-enactors realize that their robbery is real.
Why is the narrator sometimes frustrated by divergences from his re-enactment scenarios and other times finds the divergences “beautiful”?
I think it has to do with whether those divergences are the result of mistakes (i.e. actions within his control) or the result of reality intruding (i.e. because of unexpected depth of detail; cf. page 21, with the description of trying to pick up the carrot in physical therapy). There is more to reality than there is to his mental understanding: reality is thicker and tends to frustrate the best-laid plans (cf. his short-circuited fantasies on p 26-27).
On page 229, the narrator notices that the sun is not coming through the window for the same amount of time. Is this difference frustrating or beautiful? Is it the first beautiful one perhaps?
When something unexpected happens in a bank robbery, it’s “like the carrot!” (p 250). During the same conversation, the narrator is taken by the idea of a “defile” in time and the question of where the elephant disappears to.
Why does the narrator always insist on using exact words?
Ambiguity makes him dizzy (p 6) – so he wouldn’t like this book!
Did the narrator miss a chance at connection with Catherine? How would things have been different if he’s slept with her?
On page 75, he has Catherine describe an intense, clear memory, and he feels excited at her response. He’s about to sleep with her, but he remembers all his sketches in the bedroom.
Why is he obsessed with completing and repeating?
In addition to the re-enactments, he is unhappy about the extra half million (p. 8), he circles back to his apartment several times, and he gets excited about completing his coffee-shop loyalty card (p 52).
What is the significance of the fact that he always mistakes “light removals” as “light, removals”?
It happens on page 11 and on page 208, with the correction on page 211. Is there always an incidence of tingling between the misunderstanding and the understanding?
If my interpretation of the narrator’s motivation is correct (the re-enactments as a means of understanding), why does he say “I don’t want to understand them” (p 247)?
There can be a joy in applying the intellect in cases where reality doesn’t completely yield itself to understanding. Compare, for example, the experience of watching “Inland Empire”: the enjoyment comes from not quite figuring out how all the pieces fit together. I relate this idea to the “thickness” of reality that I mentioned earlier: the experience of lifting a carrot is more vivid than any modeling of the action, and the part that resists modeling – the remainder? – is what makes the experience what it is.
On page 163, the narrator starts taking control of what the people in his building are doing. He likes being able to know what they are up to even when he can’t see them or sense them. What’s that all about?
The idea of slowing events down, stretching out time, is linked to this advice from a coach to an athlete: ““Project! Will it into the goal… Slow each second down!” (p 238)
Why the insistence on no cameras?
Was cordite involved in the accident?
On page 272, right before the climax, Naz gives our narrator several definitions for ‘residual’ (and related words), each of which seems partly to apply to the current situation. In a way, that’s a symbol for the explanations provided about the narrator’s behavior. Many things seem to explain parts of it; they all seem related; but it doesn’t all fit together perfectly. Certain things feel significant even if you can’t explain exactly why. It appears to be working sub-intellectually. The word ‘residual’, by the way, first appears on page 259.