Tom McCarthy, _Men in Space_

WRITTEN, OR MOSTLY written, apparently, before Remainder--seems more like a first novel than Remainder does, to me... wild diffuseness, firecracker wit, occasional brilliant flashes, somewhat like Broom of the System.

I started this a while ago; I read the first 60 pages or so in 2017. Then, I got cancer, stuff happened, yada yada, and I only happened to pick it up again last week. Finished it quickly--it's really good--but when I resumed reading I had completely forgotten who was who and what was afoot.

As far as one strand of the novel went, my inability to pick up the thread did not matter all that much. Men in Space is one more instance of that great emerging 21st century genre: young literary-minded westerner(s) on the loose in the former Soviet bloc. (My favorite: Caleb Crain's Necessary Errors. Silver to Garth Greenwell.) Much of Men in Space is set in Prague during the weeks towards the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993 when Slovakia and the Czech Republic split. While one can, in reading these novels, make a point of remembering which character is which, that effort is dispensable, for the main event is always that the center is not holding and everyone is doing some painful growing up in public in the midst of a historical watershed. McCarthy gets high marks on this strand.

The novel's other strand, though, is a caper plot, involving the theft and forgery of a medieval Slavic icon painting. In such cases, recalling the setup from the opening pages helps a good deal. I never did figure out where the original authentic icon wound up, or quite recall the purpose of the forgeries. I found my own confusion no obstacle at all to enjoyment, however--in the first place because McCarthy somewhere picked up an awful lot of knowledge about painting and uses it well, in the second because McCarthy's sentences are constantly a pleasure.

Narrative point of view hops among a few characters, usually in close third person, but one is in the first person: an earnest but frazzled secret policeman who anticipates somewhat the narrator of Satin Island.

The title derives from a joke passed around among the characters about a cosmonaut who was a citizen of the USSR when we went up but citizen of an entirely new state when he came down. The ground beneath us can transform utterly while we are temporarily up in the air. And you can find yourself suddenly finishing a novel you began three years ago.