Review of The Incarnation of Making by Tom McCarthy

Like some people watch football or baseball, I regularly watch an esport called Starcraft 2. Called a ‘real-time strategy’ game, players make reactive and proactive decisions on the fly while building the right army to attack and defeat their opponent. Gameplay is typically divided into two parts: micro and macro. Micro is the player’s ability to control their army in real time—engaging, retreating, selecting individual units and groups of units to attack and defend, and so on. Macro is the broader picture, the strategic decisions above the real-time decisions that players make toward victory—which units to construct and in what quantity, how to prioritize economy vs military, how to disguise certain activities to fool the other player, etc. In Tom McCarthy’s 2021 The Incarnation of Making the overarching concept is a micro vs. macro affair.

After such intros, I normally jump to a quick plot summary. But there is no story per se in The Incarnation of Making. For lack of a better metaphor, it can feel like channel surfing on valium, with the occasional channel playing the same movie.

The Incarnation of Making shouts the question: do you dare categorize me as a novel!?!? It possesses all of the characteristics of a novel (settings, characters, dialogue, plot, scenes, etc.). Quantitatively, novel it is. But the characteristics are not synergized in anything resembling typical fashion. Qualitatively, novel it is not. McCarthy has always walked his own road, but Incarnation really makes the reader question: is this even the land of fiction? By default, given that the above characteristics do exist, the answer seems ‘yes’. Character, check. Setting, check. Action, check. Must be a novel… but the road is in some obscure province, far off the beaten path and rarely visited.

This in turn leads to the question: is The Incarnation of Making the Rothko of literature? Has McCarthy intentionally denied readers the experience they expect when looking to view “fine art”? To a large degree, the answer here is ‘yes’ also. There is a perpetual and calculated undermining of the aforementioned basic elements of fiction. There is clear obfuscation what “motivation” is in a story, despite that, at a minimum, I think most readers would agree: the writer needs to give the reader a reason to read. In other novels’ cases, this is mystery, justice or revenge. But in Incarnation, nothing close exists. There is an extended moment when a ‘mystery’ seems to take shape—a question needing an answer. But McCarthy eventually abandons it without explanation, moving on to another disconnected scene.

But MCarthy has certainly not produced a large, black square a la Rothko. There are details—a lot of them. And it’s to a good degree that these details, not in detail, play a role in defining the novel. Tactile, edged, moving and still—the novel is full of descriptions of things, and processes of things. Delivered in cold, stilted language, often in list form, the book can read like a laboratory inventory. And indeed there is a motif, a sterile mood of “science”, of pipes and channels, surfaces and machines, materials and movement that emerges from the narrative. As the title suggests, humanity is creating, things are being “made”, just not of the plot variety.

In the end, The Incarnation of Making is something different in the market of fiction. Very different. Extremely different. It will appeal to higher brow readers who take literature very seriously and are looking for writers who shatter the mold. I appreciate this macro—the novel’s meta-image, meta-commentary, and meta-perspective to fiction as a whole. It’s important such books exist. They keep the mainstream honest. They offer balance—a polar opposite to the cheap slush the market does so often generate. They offer a historical reference point for future scholars and readers. See here, at the turn of this century, writers were pushing the bounds of the novel as a form of writing. At the micro level, however, it’s masochistic. The diction is obtuse. The narrative never achieves a flow state. There are run-on sentences loaded with the details of realia. The characters are almost as cold as the realia around them. There is essentially no plot to link the pieces together. In short, Incarnation is an art project. It’s extreme niche. If the above review does not pique your interest, then it’s unlikely the book will either.