Tom McCarthy is a writer and conceptual artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in central London. McCarthy grew up in Greenwich, south London and was educated at Dulwich College (1978 to 1986) and later New College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}, he worked in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out. McCarthy has also worked as a television script editor. In 2010 The New Statesman described him as "the most galling interviewee in Britain."

McCarthy's debut novel Remainder was published in November 2005 by Paris-based art publisher Metronome Press. It was distributed through gallery and museum shops, but not in chain bookstores{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}, and received widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream press. The London Review of Books called it "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent claimed that "its minatory brilliance calls for classic status" . The novel was re-published in a much larger UK print-run by the more conventional English publisher Alma Books (2006), and in the US by Vintage (2007), where it ranked as an Amazon top one-hundred seller and entered the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. On its American publication the New York Times dedicated the front cover of its book section to the novel, calling the book "a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny" . In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award and Zadie Smith, wrote in the New York Review of Books, that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years", suggesting it showed a future path that the novel "might, with difficulty, follow" . It has since been translated into nine languages, and an adaptation for cinema is currently being undertaken by Film4 Productions{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}.

A work of literary criticism by McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006, with French (Hachette Littératures), Spanish (El Tercer Nombre), Italian (Piemme) and American editions (Counterpoint) following in 2007-8. The book, which attempted a reading of Hergé's Tintin books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}, divided reviewers, with some critics reacting adversely to the book's unabashed celebration{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}} of divisive literary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}. Killian Fox in The Observer praised "its author's obsessive approach, his breathtaking grasp of the oeuvre and the sheer exuberance with which he tackles his subject" . However, in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes criticized its methodology and style: "McCarthy's text has that pleased-with-itself smirk that was so characteristic of the early 90s, when journalists started purloining critical theory from the academy, liking the way it made them feel clever" .

In 2007 Alma Books published a second novel, Men in Space, much of which was written prior to Remainder. Several foreign editions are forthcoming{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}. McCarthy has also published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, Artforum and The New York Times, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail). In 2004 he published an essay on excrement in the work of James Joyce in the online literary journal Hypermedia Joyce Studies. In 2008 an essay by McCarthy on Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author he has often expressed an admiration for, was published in the new Oneworld Classics English edition of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy .

Since 1999 McCarthy has operated as 'General Secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' called the International Necronautical Society (INS). A blatant reprise of early twentieth century avant-gardes{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}, the INS operates through publications, live events, media interventions and more conventional art exhibitions. In a 2007 interview with the website Bookninja, McCarthy explained the circumstances that led to the formation of the INS: "I was quite well integrated into the art world in London by the late nineties, and on top of that I’d for some time had an interest in the modes and procedures of early twentieth century avant-gardes like the Futurists and Surrealists: their semi-corporate, semi-political structures of committees and subcommittees, their use of manifestos, proclamations and denunciations" . Despite his initial claim that the INS was 'not an art project' , McCarthy has accepted invitations to show work in his capacity as INS General Secretary at art institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Moderna Museet Stockholm, the Drawing Center New York, Kunstwerke Berlin, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, and Substation Gallery Singapore.{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}

The INS has been described by Art Monthly as "a platform for fantastically mobile thinking." . In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from which more than forty assistants generated non-stop "poem-codes" which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}. In 2008 a more mechanical version of this piece was displayed at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, in which an aeroplane Black Box transmitter sent out a stream of similar messages . In 2007, after McCarthy and INS Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley had delivered the 'INS Declaration on Inauthenticity' at New York's Drawing Center, the critic Peter Schwenger alleged in Triple Canopy magazine that the two men who appeared in the gallery were not in fact Critchley and McCarthy . Taking his claim as an inspiration, McCarthy and Critchley did indeed replace themselves with actors when delivering the Declaration one year later at Tate Britain . When invited to deliver the Declaration a third time at the 2009 Athens Biennial, they announced that the Declaration would henceforth be outsourced to any institution who wanted it, and commissioned a Greek translation, which was subsequently delivered by Greek actors in Athens .

McCarthy has also made artworks outside of his role as INS General Secretary. In 2005 he exhibited, at The Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, the multimedia installation piece 'Greenwich Degree Zero', produced in collaboration with artist Rod Dickinson, which (in a tribute to Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent), depicted the Greenwich Observatory burning the ground. The piece was subsequently purchased by the Arts Council England's permanent collection . In 2006 he collaborated with French artist Loris Gréaud to produce an 'Ontic Helpline' for a fictitious 'Thanatalogical Corporation' - a black telephone that transfers callers through an endless loop of pre-recorded messages. The telephone was displayed in the FiAC collection in Paris, and purchased by gallerists/collectors Solene Guillier and Nathalie Boutin{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}.

In 2010, McCarthy wrote the script for Johan Grimonprez's feature film Double Take (2010). The script consists of a short story, loosely based on Borges's 'August 25, 1983', in which Hitchcock meets his double on the set of one of his films{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}.

McCarthy has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He is currently teaching a course on “Catastrophe” with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Remainder

Remainder tells the story of an unnamed hero traumatized by an accident which “involved something falling from the sky”{{fix|link=Wikipedia:Citation needed|text=citation needed|class=noprint Template-Fact|title=This claim needs references to reliable sources|date=}}}. Eight and a half million pounds richer due to a compensation settlement but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder’s protagonist spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past, such as a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, or lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them. These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him. When the recreation of mundane events fails to quench this thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, including shoot-outs and a bank heist.

Men in Space

Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The icon's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near-misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space, be it physical, political, emotional or metaphysical. McCarthy uses these settings to present a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.

C

McCarthy's novel C was released in late 2010 - in the US with Knopf, in the UK with Jonathan Cape. McCarthy has described this novel in previous interviews as dealing with technology and mourning. The book has been shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.Leo Robson in the New Statesman review describes the book as "full of familiar delights and familiar tedium", with "Protracted descriptions of a pageant and a seance [that] drain the reader's will to live." It continues "After a certain point, most sentences go something like this (not a parody): "Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays.""

Repetition and Duplication

One of the main themes pervading McCarthy’s work is that of repetition and duplication. The novelist himself has discussed the importance of this subject in an interview . The repetition in Remainder takes the form of re-enactments of events carried out by the wealthy post-traumatic hero in a process that some critics (such as Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books ) have seen as allegory for art itself . In Men in Space it takes the form of duplication of an artwork, and a set of patterns repeating over several centuries. In McCarthy’s art projects it has taken the form of repeating sets of messages over radio in the style of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée [1] . Boyd Tonkin, in his Independent profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications .

Failed Transcendence

Several critics have noted the centrality of failed transcendence to McCarthy's work, particularly when discussing Men in Space . McCarthy himself has used this term in interviews to describe the collapse of the idealist project in philosophy, art and literature. The notion of failed transcendence also forms a central tenet of 'The New York Declaration on Inauthenticity', an INS talk delivered in the style of a propaganda statement by McCarthy and the philosopher Simon Critchley in 2007 in the Drawing Center, New York .

Matter

In relation to failed transcendence, the notion of matter seems to play a central role in McCarthy’s work. Remainder's hero is obsessed with “surplus matter”: the residues and traces of events. In his INS publication 'Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art', McCarthy discusses figures such as Dorian Gray, whose image becomes material (so much so that it rots), the work of Francis Ponge (which is preoccupied with the materiality of messy objects such as oranges and oysters), and most importantly the fat, blubbery whale of Moby Dick, who frustrates Ahab's idealistic attempt at self-projection. In a discussion with the artist Margarita Gluzberg, held in 2001 in London's Austrian Cultural Forum, McCarthy cites Georges Bataille's description of matter as “that non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law” . In a lecture delivered to the International James Joyce Symposium in 2004 in Dublin, McCarthy again cites Bataille, drawing on his notion of “base materialism” to throw light on the scatological sensibility displayed in Joyce's novels .

Transmission

Another recurring theme in McCarthy’s work is that of transmission. The detective in Men in Space clearly embodies this concern: he is a radio surveillance operative who starts out boasting he “can always get a strong signal”, but ends up losing the signal and then becoming deaf, cut off from all communication. In one interview, McCarthy has discussed this character’s similarity to Coppola's Harry Caul in The Conversation .Transmission is also central to Cocteau's Orphée, around which McCarthy created an art project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by FM and internet. This project was indebted to William S. Burroughs's notions of viral media and to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notions of the "crypt", a space both of burial and encryption. The art-piece Black Box, originally displayed in Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2008, also involved constant radio transmissions.

Extensive overviews of reviews of and articles on Tom McCarthy's work can be found at Surplus Matter and Complete Review (Remainder) and Complete Review (Men in Space).

Tom McCarthy, Calling All Agents (London: Vargas Organization, 2003). ISBN 0-9520274-8-8

Tom McCarthy, Men in Space (London: Alma Books, 2007). ISBN 978-1846880339

Tom McCarthy, Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art (London: Vargas Organization, 2002). ISBN 0-9520274-5-3

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Paris: Metronome Press, 2005). ISBN 2-9162620-0-8

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (London: Alma Books, 2006). ISBN 978-1846880414

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (New York, NY: Vintage, 2007). ISBN 978-0307278357

Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006). ISBN 978-1862078314

Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008). ISBN 978-1582434056

Remainder

Tom McCarthy, 8½ Millionen (Zürich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009). ISBN 978-3-03734-055-4

Tom McCarthy, ??????????? (Athens: Papyros, 2007). ISBN 978-9606715266

Tom McCarthy, Déjà-vu (Milan: ISBN Edizioni, 2008). ISBN 978-8876380952

Tom McCarthy, Et ce sont les chats qui tombèrent, tr. Thierry Decottignies (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2007). ISBN 978-2012372597

Tom McCarthy, Et ce sont les chats qui tombèrent, tr. Thierry Decottignies (Paris: J'ai Lu, 2009). ISBN 978-2290013847

Tom McCarthy, Ostatak (Zagreb: Oceanmore, 2008). ISBN 978-9537056537

Tom McCarthy, Remanescente (Lisbon: Estampa, 2009). ISBN 978-9723325027

Tom McCarthy, Residuos (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2007). ISBN 978-8483810200

Men in Space

Tom McCarthy, ???????? ??? ???????? (Athens: Papyros, 2008). ISBN 978-9606715600

Tom McCarthy, Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2009). ISBN 978-2012374065

Tintin and the Secret of Literature

Tom McCarthy, Tintin e il segreto della letteratura (Milan: Piemme, 2007). ISBN 978-8838486685

Tom McCarthy, Tintin et le secret de la littérature (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2006). ISBN 978-2012372580

Tom McCarthy, Tintín y el secreto de la literatura (Madrid: El Tercer Nombre, 2007). ISBN 978-8496693111