Satin Island
by Tom McCarthy
First Reviewed May 2018
As always with my late twenty-teens reviews, my repost-editing is mostly removing semicolons. Boy, did I love incorrectly using semicolons.
I also don’t remember much about this book, and this review really says nothing. I know I read Satin Island, but if I were a professor grading this essay I’d think, “Did the writer actually read anything or just goof off and spew some convoluted banalities?” What was this book? What was I doing? What was life in 2018 like?
Not a single interesting question is answered here.
I find Satin Island very unnerving. It is kind of what I figured being able to read another person’s thoughts would be like: slow moving; dense; hard to process; but functionally similar to how I consider things. The narrator is a bit of a donkus, but aren’t we all? I mean, I assume we all puff up our self-image with cool actions in strange scenarios rather than—what did the book say?—“quietly seething.” For context: “Needless to say, we—I—didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited.”
One of the more difficult interpersonal lessons that Satin Island broke for me was the need to acknowledge that I cannot simply project myself into everyone else like I am some sort of default perspective for life. As in, "This is what I would do, so it is probably what you would do, right?” type thing. This is how I want to be treated, so this is how I’ll treat you, okay? Golden rule literalism is functionally childish, a decent primer so you’re not, uh, stealing and hitting—those are pretty easy lines to draw, no one wants to get dead—but bad when it’s like, “Hey man I would really rather limit my physical contact with others but, uh, you might like the reassurance of physical contact, so I suppose we can hug.”
The book is rife with images of grandeur, machinations of self-import. This portraiture is eerily relevant to the idea that I—or the narrator—can superimpose our selves onto strangers, push our wills onto the world, thrust our minds onto an unknown and unknowable schemata, draw order from chaos. We cannot. But we try anyway. This is why hubris is the weakness of our age, as it is with any age of humanity that reaches a crescendo in individualized art before enforced structural equality.
But fiction of a cipher-character writing things to us and for us straddles our reality and the reality within the pages. This entices the readership into conflating the god-author—who can control reality—with the subject-narrator—who is slave to what has been written—illuminating a concept of free will onto a clearly pre-scripted page. Satin Island spits out what it is to be alive, enforces the creation a new nothing grounded in an experiences that exist in reality, but even moreso, within the pages.
That is, in the end, what we are: ink in someone’s story. What our modernity hath wrought is nothing but assumption, individual realities accepted across broad swaths of society. The only active way to have our thoughts reprocessed into a comprehensible system is writing. Thus only reading can approach actual intrapersonal connection. Fiction is life, life is fiction—what gives reality meaning is the same as what gives stories meaning: nothing, at all.