Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was a bit of a darkhorse darling when it first arrived on the scene, enjoying attention from everyone and their mother, the latter of whom rightly celebrated it and nearly exhausted it, marking it as possibly “one of the great English novels of the past ten years.” I can do nothing much here in the way of aesthetic appreciation but agree, reiterate and repeat, and thus much of the customary cuddling I might do with what the book is I’ll leave to my precursors in the interests of an appreciation of what the book represents—which is, to say the least, promising.