Books: Briefly Noted

SATIN ISLAND, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf). This experimental novel takes the form of a brilliant series of numbered digressions on parachute accidents, Lévi-Strauss, hub airports, and many other things. The narrator, who calls himself U., is an anthropologist working for the “Company” on something called the Koob-Sassen Project. The project’s goals are oblique, but its influence, we are told, is all-pervasive. U.’s job is to draw connections, and he does so with frenzied panache; an imagined presentation on oil spills concludes, “Is not the flow of oil the flow of time itself: slowly but inevitably crawling, in a series of identical, repeating pulses, to some final shoreline?” If the novel ultimately feels like a bravura display of empty rhetoric, who’s to say that’s not precisely the point? ALL DAYS ARE NIGHT,…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Mar-16-15

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