'Satin Island' Floats in the Aura of Fiction

“I got really into creases. Jeans crease in all kinds of interesting ways: honeycomb, whisker, train-track, stack…I catalogued no fewer than seventeen different crease-types, each of which has slightly different innuendos.” So explains U., the unnamed narrator and protagonist of critically acclaimed avant-garde author and artist Tom McCarthy’s newest novel, “Satin Island.” U. goes on to reveal his secret for framing the value of these minutiae to the client, Levi’s: He repurposes French philosophers Deleuze and Badiou, respectively, of their concepts of “le pli” (fold) and the “rip,” stripping them, as he says, of “all the revolutionary shit” and “radical baggage” and applying this figurative vocabulary to the literal folds and rips in a pair of jeans. The passage is an apt synecdoche for the rest of the novel. “Satin Island” explores the nature of “meaning” for a man whose job it is to find meaning in everything and repackage it with a narrative. Some of the book’s best moments are its references to philosophy and history—simplified, like Deleuze’s folds and Badiou’s rip, to sound almost like fairytales. At its worst, U.’s obsessive search for significance may become tedious for his readers; yet, on the whole, McCarthy has written an engaging work that forces the reader to reassess “meaning” itself.

U., an anthropologist and “corporate ethnographer” working for “The Company” on the “Koob-Sassen” project, as well as on something called the “Great Report.” These names are deliberately made to sound cryptic. U. tells readers flat-out that he will not and cannot give details on the Koob-Sassen project—and as for the Great Report, not even U. himself quite understands what it is. Instead, U. tells about his private obsessions, of which he has many, including oil spills and a parachutist’s death in which he suspects foul play. The novel, specific and vague in all the wrong places, has hints of Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet and even the faux-noir flavor of Thomas Pynchon. It also has a slight James Joyce aftertaste as one emerges from the swamp of U.’s stream of consciousness. On the whole, however, structurally and in its synthesis of different experimental techniques, “Satin Island” is one of a kind.

McCarthy has a rare appreciation for the intersection of beauty and hilarity, seriousness and irreverence. He excels at clever wordplay and whimsical one-liners. For example, U. casually reassembles words to emphasize the condition of inhabiting one’s work— “The Report might somehow…be be-d, rather than written”—and to sum up architectural embellishments—“all such wedding-cakery.” After the Koob-Sassen project goes live, U. says, “Its implementation had been deemed a great success. By whom? I don’t know. Deemers. And the Company’s contribution had been praised, by praisers, as quite brilliant.” But beyond and through such lighthearted remarks, McCarthy is also capable of driving at serious truths, as when U.’s friend Petr, dying of cancer, laments that there will be no one to tell about his death, or when U.’s girlfriend, Madison, explains the necessity of withholding information in relationships.

McCarthy also has a magic touch for imbuing his descriptions of real events and phenomena with the aura of fiction. His key technique is to describe them in terms of patterns and systems (as is U.’s wont). U. explains the rituals of Vanuatu and his colleague Daniel details the traffic jams of Lagos and the paved streets of Paris in this way: The Nigerian highway, for example, becomes “sequences of alternation and progression...helix-maps of DNA”—symmetry and diagrammatic perfection are thus revealed to be integral elements of story. For a reader unfamiliar with McCarthy’s previous work, it is perhaps only through these passages that one would glean the author’s immense talent for traditional storytelling.

Barring, to a certain extent, these brief anecdotal asides, McCarthy’s narrative style is anything but traditional. “Satin Island” is entirely driven by U.’s internal monologue—essentially continuous, borderline schizophrenic exposition—which is alternately enjoyable and unpleasant. U. goes to great lengths to describe the most trivial and minute of details, in which he finds grand sense and drama. Conversely, U. defines what would seem to most readers as real tragedy in terms of the banal when he cares to provide any description of these things at all. As a result, McCarthy forces readers to reevaluate what it means for something to have or to lack. This is especially marked in places where readers are likely to disagree with U.’s own ridiculous assessments, as when, for example, he expounds on the divine righteousness of oil spills. As U. explains from the beginning, he and his company “dealt…in narratives.” It only takes the right rhetorical spin to make something seem meaningful. Far from changing one’s mind, then, about what is and isn’t significant, a reader is likely to come away with a sense of renewed priorities. There is something special gained in the process of stripping meaning away and planting it anew.

Granted, the process by which McCarthy goes about uprooting meaning may begin to weary the reader. U.’s unorthodox narration is given structure by the novel’s unorthodox format. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is further segmented into roughly page-long fragments, numbered 1.1, 1.2, etc. Like line breaks in a poem, these disjunctions lend a weightier significance to each segment’s concluding line. The forced punctuation of often-meaningless statements, however, soon becomes irritating. Similarly, as the novel progresses, U.’s extended descriptions and in-depth analyses of oil and parachutists begin to drag. The formula U. seems to apply to eke out meaning from anything becomes unimpressively predictable, as U becomes less trustworthy and more neurotic and self-indulgent. He has an existentialist’s keen nihilistic self-awareness, yet he lacks the requisite ownership of responsibility. While these qualities may be necessary for the text to succeed at a meta level, the cost is a novel that at times falls short of entertaining. That said, when McCarthy has had his way with readers’ preconceived notions of “meaning,” the result is, to a moderate degree, transformative.

—Staff writer Mia J. P. Gussen can be reached at mia.gussen@thecrimson.com.