“Satin Island” (Knopf), by Tom McCarthy
“Events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.” So proclaims Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island,” a rather dazzling array of sentences and paragraphs and snippets of memory and thought that aren’t quite sure where they are.
The cover of “Satin Island” bears a number of possibilities: it could be a treatise, an essay, a manifesto, and so on, but each of these is crossed out, leaving only “A Novel.” Anyone familiar with the history of the novel should get that joke.
And “Satin Island” is very funny; intellectually, culturally, uncannily funny, in that way that absurd, dystopian stories about hyper-bureaucracy are funny - think Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and you’re halfway there.
U. (“You”? Or perhaps “Ulysses”?), is a corporate ethnographer, a job title…