Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and
critic Tom McCarthy
Fifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the
sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most
original and challenging novelists at work today. Typewriters, Bombs,
Jellyfish explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather
considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and
the movies of David Lynch, to Patty Hearst as revolutionary sex goddess,
to the still-radical implications of established masterpieces such as
Ulysses (how do you write after it?), Tristram Shandy, and the
unsung junky genius Alexander Trocchi's darkly beautiful Cain's Book.
The longer "Recessional" examines the place of time in writing--how
writing makes a new time of its own, a time apart from institutional
time--while the startling "Nothing Will Have Taken Place" moves from
Mallarmé and Don DeLillo to the ball mastery of Zidane to look at how
art, whether that of a poet, novelist, or athlete, destroys given codes
of meaning and behavior, returning them to play. Certain points of
reference recur with dreamlike insistence--among them the artist Ed
Ruscha's Royal Road Test, a photographic documentation of the roadside
debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car;
the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up
the machinery of commerce and military domination--and the question
throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of
so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the
active reinvention of the world?
