Zadie Smith takes a look at one of my favorite novels this year--Tom McCarthy's Remainder.

Maybe the most heartening aspect of Remainder is that its theoretical foundations prove no obstacle to the expression of a perverse, self-ridiculing humor. In fact, the closer it adheres to its own principles, the funnier it is. Having spent half the book in an inauthentic building with re-enactors re-enacting, the Re-enactor decides he needs a change:

One day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report.

A minimalist narrative refusal that made me laugh out loud. Remainder resists its readers, but it does so with a wry smile. And then, toward its end, a mysterious "short councillor" appears, wearing this same wry smile, like one of David Lynch's dwarfs, and finally asks the questions--and receives the answers--that the novel has denied us till now. Why are you doing this? How does it make you feel? In a moment of frankness, we discover that the Re-enactor's greatest tingle arrived with his smallest re-enactment: standing in a train station, holding his palms outward, begging for money of which he had no need. It gave him the sense "of being on the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law--I don't know. ..."

"I don't know." I'd say that pretty much sums up Remainder. It's the sort of tongue-in-cheek book that revels in its dry, bleak sense of humor and pitch-black outlook. Enjoy it when you're not looking to have all your questions answered. Or, better yet, after a bad day at work.