Recessional - Or, the Time of the Hammer

In this essay, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy ("Remainder," "C," "Satin Island") unearthes a pattern, a rationale that is working both in and against the canon of modern(ist) literature, of authors such as Thomas Pynchon, JG Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and William Faulkner. McCarthy tackles a specific obsession with time that haunts their works; a time that is marked by arrest, pause, suspension, interval, eternal moments, tool-downage, waiting. Recessional time, as it were. Can't touch this, as a famous MC Hammer song line says, "it's hammer time: " this is precisely that time (or tense) of fiction that is central to Tom McCarthy's own writing. The essay is followed by a conversation with the author in which he discusses his own practice of writing, taking his recent novel "Satin Island" as a starting point, and casting a new light on the debate about avant-garde and realist novels.