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We tend to stay away from the literary efforts of conceptual artists: They're pretentious and weird and are responsible for atrocities like naked fatties on beaches and Central Park in Code Orange flags. And is it not against some kind of mime code to write dialogue? There is, however, the occasional exception: Tom McCarthy, for instance. Young and British and (yes, this kills us) shockingly talented, McCarthy is the General Secretary of INS (International Necronautical Society), a semi-ficticous network with a semi-fictitious manifesto about death, which is kind of the ne plus ultra of pretension. But he's somehow managed to stifle those urges and come up with Remainder, the debut novel published in England last year to positive reviews and comparisons to Beckett and David Lynch. It's arrives stateside on February 13, and it's almost impossible to describe without ruining it. But we'll try:

There's a narrator - as unreliable as he is unnamed - who has endured a horrific accident for which he has received a 8.5 million settlement on the condition is that he never disclose anything about it. As the novel progresses, he stages a series of bizarre schemes and conceptual-art type projects which he funds with the help of an Indian fellow who works at an international concierge service. Think Fight Club meets The Magic Christian, but bizarrely English. The novel culminates in a final project that may or may not tell us about what happened before the book began. It shouldn't work - it should, in fact, be insufferable - but Remainder is one of those novels that you finish and turn immediately back to the beginning, to fill in the gaps you may have missed the first time around. It leaves you feeling sort of shaken and very impressed. Still, conceptual artists are kind of twatty. Quit your day job, Tom.

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