'Tintin and the Secret of Literature' by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy

Counterpoint: 212 pp. $15.95 paper

BRITISH writer Tom McCarthy's debut novel, "Remainder," left American critics enthralled when it appeared here last year. In that novel, McCarthy creates a fun-house architecture that ultimately becomes a prison for protagonist and reader alike. Narrated in the first person, "Remainder" concerns a survivor of some odd, unexplained accident. With the settlement money, he sets out to choreograph meticulously detailed "reenactments" of recalled or imagined mundane events. The question of whether the re-creation can be more authentic than the original -- whether the real fake can supersede the real thing -- gets fuzzier and fuzzier as the mentally scrambled young man stages increasingly bizarre scenarios, with eventually disastrous results. "Remainder" is a remarkable and assured piece of writing, stuffed with philosophical import yet decidedly literary, drawing as it does on the avant-garde European tradition of such writers as Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. You might call McCarthy's "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" a curious follow-up, but in fact it reads in places like notes to "Remainder."

"Tintin and the Secret of Literature" explores the life and work of Hergé, the Belgian writer and artist who launched the "Tintin" series of comics in Le Petit Vingtième, the children's supplement to a Brussels newspaper, in 1929, sending his eponymous hero off to the USSR with his faithful dog Snowy to "report" the goings-on in the new Bolshevik state. This led, a year later, to the first of the "Tintin" books ("Tintin in the Land of the Soviets"). The series became wildly popular throughout Europe -- the original drawing for the cover of "Tintin in America" (1931) fetched more than a million dollars earlier this year at auction in Paris -- and Hergé churned out some two dozen "Tintin" books before his death in 1983 at age 75. The Pynchonesque derring-do of young Tintin and the rest of the recurring cast (Professor Calculus, the hard-of-hearing twins Thomson and Thompson, the velvet-voiced diva Bianca Castafiore) animated Hergé's writing with a zany brio that would be the antithesis of, say, Charles Schulz's matter-of-fact "Peanuts."