Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy (b. 1969) was born in London and studied English at Oxford. He founded the International Necronautical Society (INS) in 1999 — a semi-fictitious avant-garde organisation that issues manifestos, stages events, and interrogates the relationship between death, technology, and representation. The INS is part artistic project, part philosophical provocation, and it inflects everything McCarthy writes.

Life and Career

Remainder (2005) — about a man who receives an eight-and-a-half-million-pound settlement after an unspecified accident and uses the money to obsessively restage moments from his life, hiring actors to repeat mundane scenarios with increasing precision — was rejected by commercial publishers and initially published by the tiny Parisian art press Metronome. It became an underground sensation, was republished by Vintage, and is now considered one of the essential novels of the twenty-first century. Zadie Smith’s famous essay “Two Paths for the Novel” held up Remainder as the alternative to conventional realist fiction.

C (2010) — about Serge Carrefax, a young man born in the early twentieth century whose life tracks the development of wireless communication from amateur radio to aerial warfare — was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Satin Island (2015) — a corporate anthropologist’s attempt to write a “Great Report” that will decode contemporary culture — was shortlisted again. The Making of Incarnation (2021) explored motion capture, satellite surveillance, and the body’s relationship to technology.

Major Works and Themes

McCarthy writes about repetition, transmission, and the failure of experience to feel authentic. His novels are anti-psychological: characters are not rounded individuals but nodes in networks of information. His critical writing — particularly Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006) and essays on Beckett, Joyce, and the avant-garde — argues for a novel that abandons nineteenth-century realism in favour of formal experimentation.

Zadie Smith’s essay “Two Paths for the Novel” (2008) used Remainder and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as exemplars of two fundamentally different approaches to fiction: O’Neill’s lush, psychologically rich realism versus McCarthy’s stripped-down, conceptually driven experimentalism. Smith sided with McCarthy, and the essay launched a debate about the future of the novel that continues to shape literary criticism.

McCarthy’s position as both novelist and conceptual artist (through the INS) is unique in contemporary letters. The INS’s manifestos — declaring that “Death is a type of space” and that the organisation is “devoted to the mapping, documentation, and networking of necrotopography” — are not separate from the fiction but continuous with it: both projects investigate the relationship between representation, repetition, and the real.

Critical Reception and Legacy

McCarthy is the most intellectually rigorous British novelist of his generation — a writer whose engagement with critical theory, conceptual art, and the history of the avant-garde gives his fiction a density of ideas that few contemporary novels match. Two Booker shortlistings have brought his work to a wider audience without domesticating it.

Key Works

• Remainder (2005)
• Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006, criticism)
• C (2010) — Booker shortlist
• Satin Island (2015) — Booker shortlist
• The Making of Incarnation (2021)

Collecting McCarthy

Remainder (2005, Metronome Press, Paris) — the true first edition, published by a tiny art press in a very small run — is extremely rare: $500–$2,000+. It is one of the most sought-after first editions of the twenty-first century.

The Alma Books first UK trade edition (2006) brings $50–$200. The Vintage reprint is common and not collected.

C (2010, Jonathan Cape UK) brings $15–$40. Satin Island (2015, Jonathan Cape) brings $10–$30.

McCarthy signs at literary events and gallery openings. His dual identity as novelist and conceptual artist means he is accessible through both literary and art-world channels. Jonathan Cape first editions are the standard collected form for the later novels.