Sometimes a critic writes something about an artist that so lodges in a reader’s mind that it follows the artist around, even as the artist in question goes on to create new and perhaps very different things. Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel” did this for not one but two writers, so that, even now, six and a half years after the piece appeared, it still pops up in reviews of new books by Tom McCarthy and Joseph O’Neill.

Smith juxtaposed O’Neill’s “Netherland” with McCarthy’s “Remainder,” describing O’Neill’s book as an exemplary, if unusually anxious, work of lyrical realism, and McCarthy’s book as “an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward.” “Remainder,” Smith wrote, “empties out [the] interiority” of its unnamed protagonist by refusing him the epiphanies that a book like O’Neill’s too easily grants. O’Neill “wants to offer us the authentic story of a self,” she argued, while McCarthy’s narrator “finds all his own gestures to be completely inauthentic, and everyone else’s too.” This sharp contrast of the way each novel represents consciousness itself is, I think, the crux of the essay.

Perhaps because Smith championed McCarthy, the essay has clung to him in particular, surfacing in reviews and interviews related to his new book, “Satin Island.” When McCarthy was asked by New York about Smith’s essay, he said that the “dichotomy of realistic stuff and avant-garde stuff simply doesn’t hold,” but acknowledged that he “did read that Zadie Smith piece,” adding, “It’s a good essay. It sets up a framework for thinking, and ultimately for disagreeing.”

The narrator of “Satin Island” calls himself U. “Call me U.,” he says, either cleverly or too cleverly, depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing. He’s an anthropologist doing vague work for a vague company as part of something called the Koob-Sassen Project, presumably named by McCarthy for the artist Hilary Koob-Sassen, an acquaintance of the author’s (and the son of the sociologist Saskia Sassen, whose books include “The Global City” and “Globalization and Its Discontents”). Late in the book, U. has a dream of flying above “a great, imperial city” in a helicopter and spying in its harbor an island where trash is burned. Still asleep, he hears the words “Satin Island.” Upon waking, he thinks, of course, of Staten Island; some readers may recall J. G. Ballard’s “Concrete Island,” since McCarthy admires Ballard and their work is often compared. Others, especially those of us who haven’t quite shaken “Two Paths for the Novel,” however much we may quarrel with it, will think of “Netherland.”

“Netherland” also turns Staten Island into a symbol, of sorts. It’s on that borough that the book’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, plays cricket, and it’s there that he meets Chuck Ramkisoon, a Trinidadian with big dreams whom Smith, in her essays, dubs “a kind of authenticity fetish.” Hans never sees other white men playing cricket on Staten Island, and his admiration toward Chuck is tainted, Hans’s wife thinks, by unconscious racism: she accuses Hans of “perpetrating a white man’s infantilizing elevation of a black man.” Staten Island itself is a kind of geographical Other for Hans, who lives in Manhattan. McCarthy’s U., meanwhile, calls Staten Island “the fifth, forgotten borough, the great dump.”

This small geographical convergence of McCarthy’s new book and O’Neill’s older one may seem a minor coincidence. But it becomes harder to shake when you reach the end of “Satin Island.” In the final chapter, U. is in New York, and he decides that he wants to go to that fifth, forgotten borough. He heads down to the ferry, at which point “Netherland” surfaces again, specifically its ending, which came in for particular criticism in “Two Paths for the Novel.” O’Neill concludes with Hans remembering a trip on that ferry. All the passengers looked to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Hans says, as “their surfaces brightened ever more fiercely with the sunlight.” He then compares the lit-up skyscrapers to the colored pencils of his childhood, and recalls the “brilliant yellow mess” that was one of the two World Trade Center towers. “To speculate about the meaning of such a moment would be a stained, suspect business,” he concedes, but he knows he “wasn’t the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw—the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light.”

Smith is merciless with these lines. “There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers,” she writes. “But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be here.” This may be the harshest thing that Smith says about “Netherland,” and about lyrical realism generally, suggesting, as she does, that “literary language” is a kind of covering or embroidering over of tragedy.

McCarthy avoids explicit mention of the towers in his less lyrical end, but the closing section of “Satin Island” evokes O’Neill’s passage strongly. McCarthy’s narrator watches the ferry from Manhattan, with the sun “haloing it, transmuting it into a brilliant orange pool that spread across the harbor like a second mass of water … This pool of light was spreading right towards the ferry, swallowing it up, dismantling it pixel by orange pixel.” That “dazzle on the water” becomes “all-consuming, overexposed, blinding: the departed ferry, Staten Island, all the other landmarks and most of the sky had disappeared in a great holocaust of light.”

Did the “brilliant yellow mess” and the “people risen in light” of O’Neill’s book somehow prompt, consciously or unconsciously, the “brilliant orange pool” and the “holocaust of light” in McCarthy’s? It seems possible. And McCarthy’s ending can be read more broadly as a contrast with O’Neill’s: “Satin Island” appears to reject the notion that one might detect at the close of “Netherland,” that there is meaning, suspect or otherwise, in these personal moments of sensory bedazzlement and emotional overflow. For McCarthy, that pool of light is just pixels, the imagery implies, no more transcendent than a screensaver.

U. decides not to get on the ferry at all. “To go to Staten Island—actually go there—would have been profoundly meaningless,” he says. Then again, “Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well.” And so he finds himself “suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one?” he asks. “I don’t know.” If you are thinking of “Two Paths for the Novel” at this point, you will read these lines a particular way, though perhaps that will be on you, and not U.