Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island reminded me a bit of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, in that they both feature writer-narrators engaged in a project of writing/observation whose result, basically, is the book you’re reading. I liked 10:04 a bit more, because it’s got more New York in it and is more lyrical and optimistic, but I liked Satin Island a whole lot too, starting with its form: it’s made of paragraph-long numbered sections (some of them are long paragraphs) that are full of associations, recurring images, tangents, digressions, and nods to the narrator’s hero, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The narrator, U., is an anthropologist himself, but the culture he’s studying is his own/our own: contemporary capitalism, globalization, corporate culture and brands. He works for a company that has just won a big contract for a project he can only describe in the vaguest of terms; he is meant to be working on a “Great Report,” an impossible document that his boss describes as “The First and Last Word on our age” (61). As far as what he actually does, he travels and speaks at conferences, and he sits in a basement office and writes briefs and compiles dossiers about jeans and what different patterns of wear signify, or about breakfast, or about well, anything that he feels like, as he explains early in the book:
I had a dossier on Japanese game-avatars, and another one on newspaper obituaries; a dossier on post-match interviews with sportsmen and their managers; a dossier on alleged alien sightings and one on shark attacks; dossiers on tattoos, “personalization” trends for hand-held gadgets, the rhetoric and diction of scam emails. (35-36)
Satin Island itself follows U.’s whims and trains of thought from the very opening of the book onward: the first chapter, which is great, is pretty representative of the whole thing. The book starts with a description of the shroud of Turin, and then U. remembers being stuck in the airport in Torino-Caselle. He remembers reading about the shroud of Turin there, then remembers moving on to reading about hub-airports (because Torino-Caselle is one), then about the hub/spoke model generally, then about bicycle construction, at which point he remembers how he found himself remembering the sensation of riding a bike in his childhood, until he got distracted by the news footage being shown in the airport (which includes breaking news about an oil spill, which increasingly dominates the news coverage and U.’s thoughts). One thing leads to another, and maybe it’s all worth paying attention to: as U. puts it when talking about how sometimes he can’t tell whether something will be work for a client or work for the Great Report/himself, “Who’s to say what is, or might turn out to be, related to what else?” (36).
Like 10:04, this book is very concerned with narrative. There are the narratives that U. creates to explain how things in our culture work/what things signify, which are sometimes just bullshitting or crazy theories, and there are the other anthropological narratives U. refers to, whether he’s talking about Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques or Vanuatan cargo cults. But there are other people’s stories, too, and how they tell them: U. has a friend who’s dying of cancer, and one of the things the friend is bothered by is the sense that he’s always been conscious of his experiences in terms of how he’ll narrate/frame them to others, but death is the experience he won’t be able to narrate. And then there’s Madison, the woman U. is sleeping with, and the story she tells him about her experience of police brutality. A dream, which is a different kind of narrative (or non-narrative, maybe), gives the book its title and leads to maybe my favorite part of the book, the last chapter, in which U. visits and describes the Staten Island Ferry Terminal: there’s too much of it to quote, but oh, it’s so good, and not just because it’s about a place I can picture.
Leave a Reply