In “Two Paths for the Novel,” a recent New York Review of Books essay, novelist Zadie Smith hits it out of the park — “it” being the massive cliche that is, according to her, Joseph O’Neill’s acclaimed novel Netherland — and then follows the ball into the darkness, leaving her readers in the stands, waiting for a repeat of the play they’ve just witnessed to be re-enacted. Such, anyway, seems to be the substance of the second novel under review, Tom McCarthy’sRemainder, and if my description of Smith’s essay strikes you as just so clever it’s stupid, that’s how I felt after finishing “Two Paths for the Novel,” neither of which I want to go down as a reader. The “founding, consoling myth of lyrical Realism,” Smith writes, commenting on the novelistic tradition that proceeds from George Eliot through Saul Bellow to O’Neill, is that “the self is a bottomless pool. What you can’t find in the heavens (anymore), you’ll find in the soul.”

That’s as pithy a statement of secularism’s internal contradictions as I’ve come across, and although I haven’t read O’Neill, it does much to explain to me why I’m not able to share the general enthusiasm for the novels of Richard Ford, Richard Yates, or even the fast food fun of Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections. Such work, ostensibly disinterested in religion, is not so much a rejection of religion as an anxious substitute. That’s “cheap longing,” in a phrase of O’Neill’s mocked by Smith. As a reader, I prefer the sort of longing that comes at a cost, to the reader no less than the writer.

Then again, “the writer” is a suspicious character, according to Remainder author Tom McCarthy, who in 2003 excommunicated two members of his International Necronautical Society — an avant-garde club for cool kids — for signing with publishers, an act that made them “complicit with a publishing industry whereby the ‘writer’ becomes merely the executor of a brief dictated by corporate market research, reasserting the certainties of middle-brow aesthetics.”

According to Smith, McCarthy troubles himself more directly with religion, apparently striking dead center at middle-brow certainties:

…in the middle of the novel Remainder allows itself a stripped-down allegory on religion, staged in an auto shop where the Re-enactor has gone to fix a flat tire. While there, he remembers his windshield washer reservoir is empty and asks for a fill-up. Two liters of blue liquid are poured into the reservoir but when he presses the “spurter button” nothing spurts. The two liters haven’t leaked but neither do they appear to be in the reservoir:

They’d vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don’t ask me why: it just did. It was as though I’d just witnessed a miracle: matter—these two litres of liquid—becoming un-matter—not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated.

A few minutes later, the engine catches, matter has its inevitable revenge (“It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin”), and transubstantiation shows itself for what it is: the beautiful pretense of the disappeared remainder.

But this set piece is a set-up, since we’ve learned from Smith’s dismantling of O’Neill is that religion is no longer a component of the middle brow aesthetic that McCarthy makes over as slapstick in his car talk.

In Netherland, only one’s own subjectivity is really authentic, and only the personal offers this possibility of transcendence, this “translation into another world.” Which is why personal things are so relentlessly aestheticized: this is how their importance is signified, and their depth. The world is covered in language. Lip service is paid to the sanctity of mystery:

One result [of growing up in Holland], in a temperament such as my own, was a sense that mystery is treasurable, even necessary: for mystery, in such a crowded, see-through little country, is, among other things, space.

But in practice Netherland colonizes all space by way of voracious image. This results in many beauties (“a static turnstile like a monster’s unearthed skeleton”) and some oddities (a cricket ball arrives “like a gigantic meteoritic cranberry”), though in both cases, there is an anxiety of excess. Everything must be made literary.

Maybe that’s the trouble with both paths; O’Neill’s makes everything literary, while McCarthy’s rejects everything literary. Both, then, remain locked in a relationship with this strange god, Literary — just as it might be said that the only people who care more about God than fundamentalists are new atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, thumping their anti-Bibles and pounding their pulpits of disbelief. And Literary, along with self (the Holy Ghost) and the sentence (the Son), is, as Smith has already shown us, a secular metaphor for religion. One alternative, I suppose, is hagiography, in the original sense, a replacement of novels with the lives of saints. Boring. Another, proposed by McCarthy and seconded by Smith, is “trying (and failing) to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing, of saying ‘jug, bridge, cigarette, oyster, fruitbat, windowsill, sponge.'” McCarthy and Smith call this materialism, seemingly unaware of that term’s usage as a synonym for atheism throughout much of the 20th century. Atheism is beside the point, though, since it is not a “thing,” only an idea about things and their shadows or lack thereof. Perhaps the third path for the novel — and the fourth, fifth, and sixth — is one that’s neither disingenuous nor didactic, neither realism nor a remainder.

–Jeff Sharlet