I'm so excited to be getting a ton of fall titles in my inbox, and one of the books I was most excited to read was Tom McCarthy's C. McCarthy's first book, Remainder, was a creepy-compulsive debut novel about a man with a brain injury (we never find out what happened to him, but we know there was an accident and he became independently wealthy after the legal matters were settled) who becomes obsessed with re-enacting simple scenes over and over again. It was part Memento, part Murakami, and entirely readable.

It's unfortunate, then, that C is not really interesting at all. I gave it a hundred pages to catch my interest, and it failed. Despite some interesting subject matter—the book is set at a school for the deaf in the early 1900s, and one of the main characters is a scientist who is obsessed with teaching the deaf to talk—it feels aimless and pointless and dull. We get a lot of setup (Marconi's wireless communication devices are a plot point, and so is Morse code), but ultimately it's impossible to figure out why we should give a damn. Without even the barest thread of a plot to pull things together, it feels like a novel that is more interested in details than destinations.

A detail-driven novel can be a gorgeous thing, of course, but McCarthy doesn't write like a detail-oriented writer. He uses the simple language of a thriller to propel his books into weird psychological places. Here his simple language is wasted on pages lamely describing school pageants and childhood dalliances that don't ring true. This is a novel that I suspect could have been greatly improved with some structural realignment—it's supposed to follow one character from childhood to World War I, and then to Egypt, but the childhood bit is so uninteresting that it doesn't make the reader want to stick around to see what comes next. C doesn't diminish Remainder in any way, but it does feel like a huge misstep in what still looks like a very promising literary career.