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By JEFF TURRENTINE
After traveling widely throughout the world and studying its various peoples in all their kaleidoscopic glory, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structural *anthropology, finally arrived at a dispiriting conclusion. “Mankind has opted for monoculture,” he observed ruefully in “Tristes Tropiques,” his classic 1955 *memoir-cum-case study detailing his years spent among the indigenous tribes of Brazil. “It is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man’s daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.”
You know the saying: When modernity hands you monocultural beetroots, make lemonade. That’s what U., the protagonist and narrator of “Satin Island,” the smart, shimmering and thought-provoking new novel by the British writer Tom McCarthy, is attempting to do when we first meet him. U.’s flight back to London has been delayed, and so he’s spending his airport captivity in as productive a manner as possible: watching people as they walk past him in the terminal, *observing them as they browse the shelves of *luxury-goods kiosks, surfing the web and occasionally glancing up at the TV screens overhead to glean cursory insight into the headlines. It’s all in a day’s work for the *“in-house ethnographer” at a large, *profitable and unnamed London-based consulting firm. “Structures of kinship; systems of *exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flip side of the habitual and the banal: Identifying these, prizing them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light — that’s my racket,” he tells us.
U.’s firm is of the sort that can count among its clients not only multinational corporations but also their host governments; they come seeking expert *guidance on how to “contextualize and nuance their services and products,” how to “brand and rebrand themselves” and how to “elaborate and frame regenerative strategies.” What they’re really seeking, of course, is an inside track to the sublimated anxieties and ritualized desires of the billions of individuals that the new digital monoculture, foretold by Lévi-Strauss, has made into one big, happy, global *family of consumers. For his part, U., a classically trained anthropologist rescued “from the dying branches of academia” by his company’s charismatically Delphic C.E.O., is more than happy to oblige their requests, recognizing as he does that the market for his skills has shrunk a bit in the 80 years since Lévi-Strauss first disappeared into the rain forest. As he puts it, memorably and matter-of-factly: “Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: Corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.”
Corporate clients, moreover, can *apparently be dazzled into check-writing obeisance at even the subtlest invocation of highfalutin critical theory in support of their latest product rollout or marketing plan. Our narrator confesses to pilfering symbols from 20th-century French Marxist philosophers to sell a clothing-manufacturer client on the idea of a semiotic code embedded deeply within the creases and rips of distressed bluejeans. He’s self-aware enough to note the delicious irony inherent in “feeding vanguard theory, almost always from the left side of the spectrum, back into the corporate machine,” but — at the beginning of McCarthy’s novel, at least — he’s no cynic. When U. is explicating, for a cereal maker, “the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it),” he’s not playing subversive tricks: He sincerely believes his work can yield “not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents.”
Cynicism will come in due course — right after misgiving and trepidation, and right before apostasy. In the world of high-level consultancy, there are big gets and then there are Big Gets, of which U.’s firm has recently landed the biggest *imaginable: the contract to work on a mysterious project so multivalent and overarching that it will, upon its completion, affect the lives of every human on the planet, by redesigning nearly every formal system that people have managed to put in place. In fact, U. tells us, the *project (the details of which he’s loath to reveal, for legal and contractual reasons) is already well *underway by the time of his writing, or not writing, about it: “There’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed,” he discloses; “although you probably don’t know this. Not that it was secret. Things like that don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring.” As he and his colleagues work on the project, however, an increasingly troubled U. begins to have dream-visions of a sprawling, many-towered city being built in the desert by tens of thousands of antlike laborers: masses of people unable to envision the final result of, or even the pressing reason for, their labor — but whose faith in the task is nevertheless unshakable.
McCarthy, whose previous books *include a narratological analysis of the beloved “Tintin” children’s series in a style reminiscent of critical-theory masterworks by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, isn’t just a novelist: He’s also well known in avant-garde artistic circles as a culture-jamming provocateur. With the English philosopher Simon Critchley, he has co-founded an organization, the International Necronautical Society, that combines hard-left politics with a winking, art-school knowingness and an open nostalgia for the bygone era of artist-led movements and rhetorically overripe manifestoes. That said, the 45-year-old McCarthy’s sense of humor — which I’m happy to say is on full display in “Satin Island” — owes far more to the chilled satire of his wryly cerebral fiction-writing cohort, authors like Don DeLillo or Ben Marcus, than to the heated prolixity of a Tzara or Breton. McCarthy isn’t a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he’s a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful — in other words, compulsively readable.
Of cultural critics past, McCarthy would seem to have more in common with Guy Debord, the 20th-century French theorist who coined the term “society of the spectacle” to denote what he saw as the commodification of authentic human *experience as a function of late-stage capitalism. Many of the themes coursing through “Satin *Island” — the mediation of our lived reality by corporate technocrats; the emergence of complex networks whose structures are unfathomable to us, even as we serve them and their hidden architects; the aesthetic and political triumph of the global monoculture (good call on that one, Monsieur Lévi-Strauss) — would doubtless get an affirming nod from Debord, who uncannily predicted the advent of our socially mediated universe of discourse when he noted, back in 1967, that “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
One can’t help wondering what Debord, who died in 1994, would have made of the iWorld that we now inhabit, and that Tom McCarthy finds so darkly fascinating. It’s a world where throngs of people will *happily wait in line for hours to buy the newest iteration of a small device that gives them all of their news, keeps tabs on their friends and loved ones via third-*party service providers, and entertains them with songs and games and videos even as it records (and stores, forever) their correspondence, their purchases, their comings and goings. Witnessing that strange spectacle, apparently, is reserved for the likes of U., and you and me.
SATIN ISLAND
By Tom McCarthy
192 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
By Tom McCarthy
192 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.