“Another book of metafiction, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder approaches the same subject as The Journalist from a different direction, less concerned with character and more concerned with form; there’s a similar progression in that book, and it’s a bit surprising that I’ve never seen the two books compared. To my mind, Mathews’s book is superior because it’s more human, pointing out the unreconcilable contradiction between art and life. Mathews’s book is more concerned with text and its ineluctable linearity which forces narratives upon lives. McCarthy’s characters purposefully feel more like puppets, at service to a greater artistic program: this is purposeful, but the human cost of art is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out.”Buy The Journalist from the Godine website
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