The Making of Incarnation

June 1, 2021

Informed by the motion studies of Lillian Gilbreth (famously the mother in the memoir Cheaper by the Dozen), this novel from two-time Booker Prize short-listed, inaugural Windham-Campbell award winner McCarthy stars insomniac Anthony Garnett. His frustrated sheep-counting leads to a schematic about tracking sheep's movements as individuals within a herd, creating branching vectors of need, fear, and closeness. Soon he is inspired to form a company called Pantaray, PLC, referencing a fragment from Heraclitus, who proclaimed that we could never step into the same river twice.

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Starred review from September 13, 2021
McCarthy’s acclaimed previous novels all revealed a fascination with spatial diametrics and information theory, and the intricately calibrated latest (after Satin Island) soars even further from plot and character conventions with a study of motion, data, and trajectory. At the center of many looping narratives is Pantarey Motion Systems, whose chief engineer, Mark Phocan—who had a boyhood epiphany during a mishap at an exhibition of Joan Miró paintings where he first encountered camera playback technology—oversees the company’s various models comprising vectors and the measurement of bodies through all matter of space. Its interests include motion capture studios, various experiments with wind tunnels and water tanks, the course of an affair between Norwegian dignitaries, a mysterious client looking into the copyright of dance moves and, most prominently, the special effects department working on a science fiction movie called Incarnation. Crucial to Pantarey’s work are the boxes created by form-and-motion innovator Lillian Gilbreth to measure the pathway of workers through factories, one of which—Box 808—has gone missing. The search for the missing motion-map provides one more course through a series of set pieces that meditate on topics as diverse as the physics of space travel and the pathway of the bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. (There are also airplanes, astronauts, and Russian spies.) McCarthy arcs and zigzags through the parameters of contemporary fiction and achieves a brilliant new form. The whooshing, trawling result is the epitome of sui generis.

Starred review from October 1, 2021
McCarthy's (Satin Island, 2015) brilliant, multilayered latest is inspired by Lillian Gilbreth, the time-and-motion studies pioneer whose work sought to make movement more efficient, labor less laborious. That same absorption in minutiae is the specialty of Pantarey Motion Systems and chief engineer Mark Phocan, hired to help makers of the sf film Incarnation depict a level of accuracy and authenticity rarely achieved in even the most high-budget blockbusters. Each scene, each frame, is evaluated with an exactitude both fascinating and ludicrous to satisfy overzealous geekdom. This serves as scaffolding for McCarthy's larger philosophical arguments about how we go about "mapping particulars on to great universals." The sf epic, the making of which becomes even more science-fictional, even metafictional, affords McCarthy the range to explore myriad and disparate concepts, ranging from space travel, plane crashes, soccer, and Franz Ferdinand to Queequeg's tattoos and archaeoacoustics. These Pynchonian asides are filtered through a Joycean love of language, etymologically rich ("Archives were held in chests or arks, made of acacia wood . . . Arca can mean coffin, too") yet imbued with wry humor and devastating satire approaching profundity: "Everything is information. The entire world is an arc." McCarthy's is a prodigious intellect, keenly tuned to the "aestheticization of technology," frenetically Feynmanian, joyously Kafkaesque, yet distinctly a category of one.

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