Ben Marcus (1)Critiques

An epidemic that started among the forest-dwelling Jews — “genetic in nature … a problem only for certain people” — is spreading to other communities and threatening to impose an ominous silence upon the world. The culprit is the toxic language of children. This is the ingenious premise of “The Flame Alphabet,” a novel By Ben Marcus (Knopf. $25.95).

Marcus, the author of “The Age of Wire and String” and “The Father Costume,” is an inventive novelist, and “The Flame Alphabet” is no exception. Marcus brings to life, in startling details, an apocalyptic landscape (reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”), a devastated community plagued by the lethal virus of language. Children are immune to their own poisonous words that ravage the adults, shrink their faces, harden their tongues, and shrivel their skin until they wither away. What is a parent to do under such circumstances? Abandon an only child and flee to safety? Or stay put and feast “on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted turned rank.”

The narrator is Sam, whose daughter, Esther, is an angry teenager who seems bent on destroying her father and mother, Claire. Their only partial relief occurs when Esther is away or asleep and silent. Why Ester would harbor such exaggerated rage is not explained, alas.

Forest Jews live in an anti-Semitic world. They worship in hiding. Their synagogues are small, private huts concealed under leaves and branches, in which a “Jewish hole” with all types of conductive wires broadcast sermons. Sometimes the “Jewish hole” works, often it doesn’t. There’s a listener, too, some type of a wet, slimy contraption that must be kept humid and manipulated, or it will shrivel and become inoperative—make what you may of this metaphor.

In the end, a decision is forced upon the adults. The authorities impose quarantine and an evacuation is ordered. “Health officials counsel seclusion, even from loved ones.” Children are rounded up—“captured”—Sam and Claire attempt to sneak away in order to avoid the sight of their daughter as she is being “Trapped in a net, twitching from a jolt they fired at her.”

Sam finds himself at Forsythe, a concentration-camp-like place, where Murphy or LeBov, a frightful man, reminiscent of Hitler, is attempting to discover a vaccine for the language disease. Sam, having been assigned the task of inventing a different language to replace the toxic one, comes up with creative ways to accomplish this task without exposing himself to the virus, which has spread to the written word. Will he succeed and if so will it prove to be a cure?

A plethora of questions are raised. In particular, the importance of language in our lives, its necessity or lack of, its power to elevate or destroy: “There were only so many words you could stand before you were done.” A metaphor for life, perhaps, and a measure of our respective thresholds to bear pain, not any run of the mill pain, but the most damaging kind—pain inflicted by our own children.

The story is rich with metaphors, Biblical and otherwise: the Tower of

Babel and the breakdown of language, horrors of the holocaust—“Volunteer, test subject, language martyr.” Clair is hosed down at Forsythe as if in preparation to enter a gas chamber, children are required to carry name labels on their coats; Burk is involved in horrific Mengele-like experiments on children.

This is a brilliantly rendered story of heart-break and violence, an exploration of language, the costs and rewards of silence, societal and familial conflicts, the unconditional love of parents and, above all, whether it is possible to salvage a semblance of humanity when a community is accosted by an existential threat.

This reminds me a lot of the Codex Seraphinianus, and to some extent the wonderfully strange (and unVance-like) early Jack Vance short story The Men Return. Also, some British readers might remember a guy on TV called “Professor” Stanley Unwin: I always wished Unwin had written a book, and if he had—a sort of textbook, with diagrams—it might have come out something like this too. There are any number of ways of interpreting it; at the top of page 188 are five lines which talk about the devising of “an abstract parlance system” in an era during which the very meaning and usage of words became uncertain, and a number of newspaper book-reviewers in particular have picked up on that.
   To me what it reads even more like though is post-apocalypse, the aftermath of some surreal disaster. People, buildings, whole landscapes, the weather—all seem to have been, not destroyed, but more sort of stirred or blended together. Page 189 (“The Great Hiding Period”) talks about a time when most people retreated underground, while those who had remained at the surface “…could not discern forms, folded in agony when touched, and stayed mainly submerged to the eyes in water”.
   There is one long seventeen-page passage, similarly post-apocalyptic in feel, but in which the narrator also sounds like the subject of some sick experiment in genetics, or neuroscience, or who-knows-what. A laboratory is mentioned a number of times (“…in his lab room…”) and, just once, “Subject A” (“…This is Subject A speaking…”).
   But then again, is it a glimpse of another universe altogether, a universe similar to our own but fundamentally different too, all the way down to the laws of nature themselves? Overall perhaps each reader will see something quite different in it—like a book of those ink-blot pictures psychologists use, but all done in diagrams and prose (and some lovely prose at that).
   The Age of Wire and String is probably not recommended for anyone who prefers the conventional, the cosy, or even the usual format of plot / characters / dialogue and all the rest. It is (very tentatively) recommended for the more adventurous, or anyone bored by the plot / characters / dialogue format and who likes peering out beyond the Edge now and then to see what else might be possible.

2.5 stars
I really only got this for the short story contained in this anthology called "men," by Lydia Davis. So, I didn't read all of the stories.

Thanks go to reviewers:

Luke Reynolds
For his talented ratings of the stories
and
Ilana Diamont
For her pertinent review

Both saving me a waste of my time. Short story collections can be so hit or miss.

"Shhh," by NoViolet Buyawayo, 3 stars
The protagonist's father is dying from AIDS. Mother of Bones ( her grandma ), consults Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro, who says to avenge the spirit and heal father, they need to find two fat white virgin goats to be brought up the mountain for sacrifice and that father has to be bathed in the goats' blood. In addition, Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro says he will need 500 U.S. dollars as payment, and if there are no U.S. dollars, euros will do.

"Special Economics," by Maureen McHugh, 4 stars
" 'a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery,' JieLing said. It had been her father's favorite quote from chairman mao.
'... It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act by which one class overthrows another.' "

"Another Manhattan," by Donald Antrim, 2 stars
The title refers to another drink manhattan, and also another night in Manhattan.
A couple, Jim and Kate, have a disaster of a marriage. They have a couple of friends, a married couple, Elliot and Susan, and they're all having affairs with each other's spouses. Ugh.

"Pee on Water," by Rachel B. Glaser, 3 stars
First there was a beautiful planet, and then humans crawled out of the water.

Half of this novel is devoted to a parable of raising an adolescent, whose speech turns lethal when they learn sarcasm. The other half is one of those after-the-fall-of-civilization things where people are either dying from hearing language, or struggling to find a way to communicate without inducing lethality.

It doesn't work. Sure, the first part is fun, in an aren't-kids-awful sort of way, or maybe aren't -parents-pathetic. And okay, the idea is interesting. But Marcus clearly outruns his ability here, or isn't as clever as he thinks he is, or however you want to dress up the notion that the novel is utter crap by somebody who thinks that all there is to science is torturing lab animals until one of them surprises you.

This not unconvincing in a [b:Blindness|40495148|Blindness|José Saramago|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528481068l/40495148._SY75_.jpg|3213039] way, where you think okay, I get it, some people are bad and the rest are largely unprepared for dealing with them, but I'm not buying this whole "blindness plague", nor am I convinced that is how the government would react to it. It presents itself as an allegory, and one trundles along ignoring all the mistakes and the poor reasoning, and then one gets to the end and thinks, what, so this is about a guy who's a loser, whose wife and daughter want nothing to do with him, but he doesn't realize it and loses them and so he writes a book because communication was the problem all along, see, he didn't have a language which they understood, and that's why everything fell apart. It's not an allegory or an internal journey or anything like that: it's a dull tale about a dull guy who the world pushes around and who never learns, never improves, never figures out how to get along with other people.

But enough about the story. Let's talk about the actual writing, which is pretty difficult to get though. It's not difficult because it's complicated, or because conversation isn't directly attributed to characters, or because it's stream-of-consciousness, or because you need to infer what is happening instead of trusting the text directly. It's hard to pin down, but the closest I can come is "the writer can string words together but he cannot communicate an idea". Okay, maybe it's intentional, and writing that somehow uses words but says nothing is the result of the protagonist's "research", and see it's meta and not merely bad writing. In which case well done, pal, for your next trick why don't you make a film that stabs the viewer in the eye. It's all good if you meant to do it!

A lot of the writing lands with the sound of a ball of lead hitting a concrete floor. As a parting gift, here is a selection of phrases jarring enough to interrupt the act of reading and make a note of:

"As Murphy would later say: We are in a high season of error." Nobody would say that. Ever.

"Claire's legs rose too easily in my hands, as though they'd been relieved of their bones." You know bones are actually the light part, right? And the part that makes a leg say, liftable?

"Her bottom flattened beneath me, as if relieved of its bones, and the generous skin of her back pooled onto the bed." This is how somebody who has never seen a naked human body might describe it, sure.

"Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same." No, they don't.

"Her hand dropped, found my coldness, squished it inside her fist." The most erotic writing since [b:Dhalgren|40963358|Dhalgren|Samuel R. Delany|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532735651l/40963358._SY75_.jpg|873021]!

"The technicians bobbed in place like rifle targets". Which don't bob, at least none that I've ever seen or shot at.

"Claire shouted. I held my ground. Esther's allergy to ceremony was predicted by all the guides we'd half read about teenagers." Allergy, eh? She broke out in hives?

"When I approached him, a pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth." Nope, I don't believe you. Nor do I believe you know what a cylinder, a mouth, or birthing is.

"Claire and I held synagogue inside a small hut in the woods that recieved radio transmissions through underground cabling." The thing about radio, you see, it is travels through the air. It is broadcast. Using radio waves, I think they call them. You're thinking of cable, so-called because it travels through a, um, cable.

"What was it they'd found, a bucket of fresh, oiled genitals?" Aside from offal being an odd thing to assume children would be interested in, what's with the oil?

"And the occasional diesel helicopter." That is not a thing. I mean, okay, some people are experimenting with them to make use of biofuel in aerial vehicles, but you wouldn't be able to look up at one and say "yup, that's a diesel helicopter".

"My face felt so heavy, I thought I could remove it, step on it until it composted." Sigh. Here we go again. Okay, #1 and # 2 plastics go in the blue bin. Vegetative matter goes in the green bin for compost. Meat is discarded or fed to animals.

"Jew hole" - this one gets tossed around a lot. Sounds like something Mitch McConnell might say if he thought the cameras weren't rolling : "You! Shut your Jew-hole!" Only here, it apparently means a hole, by Jews, for Jews. No further comment.

"Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits." Wait, can I see that definition? Because the logic doesn't follow, from what you're saying.

"Bafflement is the most productive reaction". Touché.

Not sure how to describe The Flame Alphabet. How about bizarre, but not in a good way. I just didn't get it. I will say that it was well written though. I guess I prefer old school when it comes to Sci-fi, e.g. H.G. Wells, Ira Levin, Ray Bradbury.

Excellent.

nice stories :) "The Paperhanger" and "Gentleman's Agreement" are possibly my favorite.

Rave from Lee Brackstone Creative director, Faber in the Guardian

I sort of hoped I'd dislike "The Flame Alphabet" just so I could call it "the lame alphabet" in my review, but, alas, this one is really pretty good. In a story that might have been hard for some readers to identify with prior to February 2020, the book's narrator fights hard to protect his wife and daughter from a mysterious plague that seems to be spread by language. I suspect that it'd be easy for readers better-educated than myself to craft analyses of this phenomenon that make frequent references to heavy-duty postmodern texts, but, for better or worse, that's beyond me right now. In more pedestrian terms, "The Flame Alphabet" could be called a sort of near-future dystopia, a literary novel that borrows heavily from some time-worn science fiction elements. It's not an easy read, though: its prose does its best to imitate corrosive qualities of the poisoned language in the story: dry, exacting, clear-eyed, and, at times, unpleasantly dissonant, Marcus seems set on perturbing his readers at a sort of molecular literary level. Perhaps it's not the thing to read in quarantine, though the way he complements the story's themes with an astringent prose style is frankly impressive.

This isn't to say that "The Flame Alphabet" is an entirely cruel book: in a sense, it's also, in a sense, a beautiful and even heartfelt meditation on the differences between thought, speech, writing and some ultimate spiritual Word. Marcus seems to be drawing on historical traditions of Jews that worshiped in secret and Jewish ideas about the relationship between the written word, God's creation and the divine to imagine a sort of alternate religious tradition that reconfigures the relationship between all three of these things. In places -- particularly when he describes the physical relationship between the narrator and his wife and her slow, sad physical decline during the plague -- "The Flame Alphabet" can be a surprisingly physical reading experience for a novel that's so focused on ideas and so sparing with its language. As the book ends, the narrator seems to have slipped into a tranquil, largely silent old age and to have rediscovered the power of silence. While I didn't necessarily love the way that the author arrives here -- the book has a big plot hole in its last third -- it seems a fitting ending for such a tense, oftentimes contradictory piece of writing. Marcus seems to have written a text about the potentially destructive power of text itself which is both an intellectual challenge, in places, a real pleasure to read. That's no mean feat. This one was my first Marcus; I may try to hunt up some of his other books, despite the danger that they might pose to my well-being.

Beautiful writing, wonderful ideas... in search of a plot. I understand the sense of meaning is part of the poison, but this really felt like a PhD thesis (I hope my own doesn't feel that way!) There were wonderful, true things in this book, and it was confessional, but due to that, so interior that it never actually "happened." It was always in potentiate. Still, very glad I read it.

"Paranoia," by Said Sayrafiezadeh (2011): 9
- This dreamy story, caught between a sort of waking dream world, a nostalgia for the present, in which a white man (half-aware, half-unaware, unanalyzing receptacle of subaltern experience) travels through a mirage of underclass life, underclass experience of a nameless overclass machinizing above them, and which they are not even set against but only able to react in response to. Very good and the cleanness, the forward-flowing nimbleness of this prose, such a gift after the stilted, faux-readability of much other fare.

"Slatland," by Rebecca Lee (1993): 9.5
- The funny thing is, this story, this carefully controlled outburst of fluid emotion -- in which a girl sees the same therapist twice, once at 11 when she's sad and once at 31 when she's sad -- could have just as easily been included in any number of the so-called SFF anthologies I'm concurrently reading. The relevant turns are clear--the girl's ability to “rise above” her problems and survey the world around her from a literal height in order to gain perspective and move on from her depression. Yet, everything else -- the pinpoint deployment of my so-called “literary faux-prose naïveté”, the wry turns, and the counter-intuitive character expressions -- just so good, so beyond what those stories normally do, even when they're actively trying for precisely this effect. Example: when the therapist first says “girlie-whirlie” and the next line is “Despite this, my father allowed me to see him.” Otherwise, the completely unanticipated and unprepared divulsion of the fathers affair.

"The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr," by Jesse Ball (2008): 9.25
- There's a certain type of LitFic prose trick, as popular among the MFA short story crowd as it is unremarked upon -- a certain type of twee naivete, an affected autism in the impulse to hyper-describe the easily describable in such a way that, through simply language and simple observation, we get a little blob of unformed wisdom. My miles vary in relation to this kind of language, although here Ball does it about as good as you can, I'd say. I'm thinking particularly of the comedic dreamscene in which he's on the verge of confronting his eventual murderer but preoccupied with the safety of his jacket, only to reassure himself that surely 'coatmen must have an ethical code to not let anything bad happen to coats'. He mixes, unlike most of these, that kind of conscious digressiveness (the description of the elephant in the circus) with uncanny characterizations and dialogue (something that often gets under my skin, but works here ~ as in the discussion with the girl about the swan, in which she's over-bright and wisdom-from-on-high-giving, but effectively so, in a Moral Of The Story way ~ another, better example: the very funny opening lines, in which a girl at a bar reacts to a man walking up to her by crying), and, most impressively, a type of accumulated narrative momentum often absent (in this story of four men, consecutively killed during duels by the husband of a woman they accidentally caused to miscarry).

"Some Other, Better Otto," by Deborah Eisenberg (2003): 8.5
- Interesting in context of sff reservoir I've been wading in, as this has basically the narrative structure of many more “literary” contemporary speculative offerings, namely a straightforward domestic story overlaid with a patina of scientification (in this case, some deep thinking about Quantum Theory and the cosmos that our protagonist used to both reframe and detach from the more mundane [esp. in this light] aspects of their life). This mode is definitely the Light form of this method, as the Hard form uses even the light patina to causal effect in the story arc, rather than as mere symbolic gloss or ruminative whetstone, as it is here.

Stories? I don't know about that, but it's good.

Marcus’s enthusiasm for the tradition of storytelling particularly in its less popular shorter form, is intoxicating. Here he assembles a significant collection of stories all working with different materials within varied frameworks of style and themes culminating in conclusions that are, one might say bleak, but also simultaneously a joyful celebration of that bleakness. If the stories share anything in common, then it is a suggestion of possibilities for the human condition that are manifold even when hyper-intimate in scope. And their arrangement, far from being scattershot, has an abstract sense that manages to add up to a beautiful whole. This is what the anthology format was designed for.

What Marcus describes in these stories feels like the remains leftover after a world-wide collapse. All of the protagonists are emotionally beaten up and have become astute realists in their worldviews. They're haunted by the familiar humans emotions of loneliness, obsession, illness, grief and suffering. But the beauty is in how Marcus takes control of language and forces it to bend to his own singular sense of style in describing their stories.

Started off well in typical Ben Marcus fashion with the playful sentences and the wry humor. But then halfway through, it starts to settle into an entirely disengaging plot that is too traditional for the story being told and the initially engaging exploration of language-as-toxic material gets abandoned, and it doesn't help that the ending feels too abrupt and sappy.

Marcus’s enthusiasm for the tradition of storytelling particularly in its less popular shorter form, is intoxicating. Here he assembles a significant collection of stories all working with different materials within varied frameworks of style and themes culminating in conclusions that are, one might say bleak, but also simultaneously a joyful celebration of that bleakness. If the stories share anything in common, then it is a suggestion of possibilities for the human condition that are manifold even when hyper-intimate in scope. And their arrangement, far from being scattershot, has an abstract sense that manages to add up to a beautiful whole. This is what the anthology format was designed for.

Spending a day in airports can be a chore. It is refreshing, each group encountered is likely to be a bit more exotic as connections take one increasingly further from home. There was a kooky disconnect when occupying oneself with The Flame Alphabet while travelling from middle America to the Balkan peninsula. The dark speculative tale is a dense tale of symbolism gone akimbo. Children’s voices are toxic. Exposure leads to a degenerative condition where language of any sort is debilitating. There are times when I thought that the premise could’ve been better served with a 50 page story; still there were aspects explored where Ben Marcus wants the reader to take all sorts of conventions to task.

What Marcus describes in these stories feels like the remains leftover after a world-wide collapse. All of the protagonists are emotionally beaten up and have become astute realists in their worldviews. They're haunted by the familiar humans emotions of loneliness, obsession, illness, grief and suffering. But the beauty is in how Marcus takes control of language and forces it to bend to his own singular sense of style in describing their stories.

Started off well in typical Ben Marcus fashion with the playful sentences and the wry humor. But then halfway through, it starts to settle into an entirely disengaging plot that is too traditional for the kind of story being told and the initially engaging exploration of language-as-toxic material gets abandoned while Marcus struggles his way towards a sort-of ending.

This collection of short stories is electrifying! Futuristic, frightening visions of being human in a depersonalized society are created with a stunning use of language. Marcus's prose wrests any sense of complacency from the very soul of the reader and leaves in its place an awakened, shaken, and rearranged world view. These are not stories to be taken lightly!

There's a bit from the story "Lake Arcturus Lodge" in this collection:

The longer the place sat empty the harder we tried, until everything started seeming like an instance of decoration. In those first days, I floated lupine petals in the water basins, arranged butterscotches in bowls. I knew tea roses would die, but I planted them anyway, in a daze of hopeless opulence and inevitable waste."

Fridlund's book is a little like that—you can feel the very deliberate and care-filled authorial choices as you move through the stories, and those sometimes feel ornamental and Baroque where Shaker might do. But there's no denying that they're good choices, and Fridlund may be flaunting her craft but it's not altogether a negative experience, and I found myself writing down particularly pretty or striking passages the whole time I was reading. The book's slimness works in its favor too here. In the end it felt a little like travel—the world looked different when I was finished—which is not a bad thing either.

I have a lot to say, but generally I write short reviews...

First of all, I really like the essay Marcus wrote for Harper's about why experimental and difficult novels are important.
I read it after looking up what the heck I was reading, somewhere in the middle of this book.
I didn't find anything useful out there, maybe this:

"The Age of Wire and String" shows us what we don't see. An unspoken story, apparently autobiographical, pushes in against the words we are given to read--a story of a father, a mother, a brother, possibly even a Midwestern farm, where "members move within high stalks of grass--cutting, threshing, sifting, speaking."
Because we never look at this family directly, it remains intact, even as we desire to know more about it. The result, for the reader, is a certain sadness, the sadness of nostalgia.

If you haven't had a look-see into this book, then you won't really know what that all means. Essentially, this book is very experimental. It seems like he took ordinary words, and has replaced their meanings with other meanings...making its deciphering nearly impossible. Which is ok. Because the simple act of reading these familiar words in a very unfamiliar way is fun and exciting and discomforting. Plus, as that review suggests, you do still somehow get the sense, just outside your line of vision, of some kind of meaning, or some kind of ...importance. A dead brother? A math-professor father... Is this in the future? Is the narrator insane? Or part of a cult? OR! Does this book take place in a dystopian future, wherein the narrator is part of a cult...and has lost his mind.

Solved it.

Abandoned at the 1/3 point. So far it has appropriately enough read like a sermon: highly polemic of a thing I don't even yet care about, loaded with all-purpose allegory. I'm sure it's a good book but I won't find out as I dread picking it up again.

I really wanted to like this, because the idea behind it is fascinating, but I just didn't. It was a continual struggle with myself just to finish it - mainly because I can't stand leaving books unfinished - and I just kept hoping it would get somewhere. The author certainly has a gift for painting a picture with words - the classic English teacher advice: "Show, don't tell!" - but he doesn't seem to know how to deploy it judiciously. He establishes a situation in 10 pages or less, but then goes on for a further 60 pages with no new developments for no apparent reason. It's a shame his editor didn't cut large chunks of this extra text out, because the book would've been a lot better.

Very colorful but sad and disturbing book. Some beautiful imagery and ideas but does tend to run a little long in the tooth some times. Recommended to me by my soon to be author daughter.