TOM MCCARTHY’S 2005 debut, “Remainder”, managed what the jackets of so many first novels promise: a fresh and—in this case—unsettling take on contemporary life. It is about a brain-damaged man who marshals millions of pounds and a troupe of actors, consiglieres and forensic experts to reconstruct a memory. It is an intentionally confusing and difficult book that manages to draw on both Proust and Beckett, yet remain intoxicatingly readable.

McCarthy’s subsequent monograph on Hergé’s beloved comic cartoon journalist, “Tintin and the Secret of Literature”, his avant-garde collective—The International Necronautical Society—and his second novel, “Men in Space” (2007), have been no less divisive. He has received accolades and abuse, and has squabbled with critics, once declaring that a prominent publication needed a “Semtex enema”.

Still, he has been eking out a place in the canon. In her essay “Two Paths for the Novel”, Zadie Smith anoints McCarthy’s “Remainder” as one of the paths. His latest novel, “C”, has been selected for the 2010 Man Booker longlist. Over e-mail, McCarthy spoke with us about authenticity, politics, “Remainder” and “C”, a book that is as strange and powerful as anything McCarthy has done before.