After four stories in a row each featuring a more or less young, self-alienated middle-aged man who is Basically Well-Meaning and finds himself set up or set upon by women, you begin thinking, well this is a little samey. Then we transition, per the jacket copy, into the "experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form." One of the "more traditional" stories at the front of the collection, about an American invalid estranged from his girlfriend taking the cure in Germany, manages at least a kind of sub-Fitzgeraldean miserabilism, though without the distinction of prose. The flashier stuff suggests at best knockoff David Foster Wallace, maybe Bolaño on a really off day. It wants to court literary danger but only, you think, as a branding device; the surrealism, such as it is, is strictly meant to flatter the reader. All Marcus's Guggenheims and Pushcarts and whatnot must mean he's to somebody's taste, but it ain't mine. ( )

At the front of Leaving the Sea is a quote from The Washington Post's review. It includes the line "As we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if we're moving gradually through a dark chronology of America's imminent social and political unravelling." I started reading the book the day before voting began to decide the next President of the USA. The battle between Clinton and Trump has felt at times like a dark unravelling of American society and politics. So my excitement at reading something surreal that might spin my head was tempered with trepidation.

I needn't have worried. This collection of stories is a peek into the male condition, rather than a political treatise. As a woman, often confused/bemused/amused by the way the men I know behave, it was a really interesting book. ( )

Marcus seems to get bored easily. His early, straightforward stories are great, with one particular highlight exploring the dread of fatherhood... but then the author is dragged inexorably back to the abstract horror of The Flame Alphabet. Frankly, I found these language-obsessed passages to be hard work, and not in a good way. Still, worth a look for the more straightforward stories. ( )

Book picked for the cover:
Leaving the Seas: Stories by Ben Marcus
2.5 stars
I hated this book. I picked it primarily because of the cover. I had bought it because the cover is cool and the blurb on the back was interesting to me. Then with our scavenger hunt (item #4 read a book with water on the cover) I had a chance to finally read it.

Leaving the Seas is a collection of short stories. The book is broken into 6 parts and as the short stories progress they become extremely more experimental and surreal. I though the first half was okay and the second half was self-indulgent crap. So many critics rave about Ben Marcus. This was my first experience reading his work. I thought I'd like it, I was wrong. The stories were dark, bizarre, and centered largely around family. The darkness didn't bother me, in fact I actually liked some of the earlier stories. It was the pretentiousness of the rest of it that I disliked. It read like a writing experiment where the author just wanted to prove how clever he was but writing incomprehensible shorts.

You can read my full-on rant about this book on my blog here: http://thereadersroom.org/2016/01/12/winter-scavenger-hunt-a-book-with-water-on-... ( )

This collection is very deliberately structured, being divided into six sections that group together stylistically-related stories. Unfortunately, for me the structure of the book was one long downhill slope: it starts off strong, but gets worse and worse as it goes along.

"What Have You Done" is the opening story, and it's one of the good ones. A man attends his family reunion, reawakening some dark history. The character is richly complex and the writing elegant and powerful.

With the second story, "I Can Say Many Nice Things", I started thinking I was going to love this book. The story is pretty much just a character-portrait, but what a character! An author and professor teaching a course on writing on a cruise ship, the protagonist is boundlessly cynical, bitter, hugely condescending, and yet also terribly insecure and buffeted at every turn by doubt, self-loathing, and a jumble of other emotions that he and the reader can barely keep track of. The story is reminiscent of the delightful Simon Gray play Butley, featuring a protagonist whom we're unsure whether to despise or sympathize with, but who is dazzlingly alive and deeply entertaining.

With "The Dark Arts", the collection dipped down to merely "good" again. A young man with a serious illness is in Germany to undergo an experimental treatment. As with the preceding stories, most of the action takes place inside the protagonist's head, but what goes on there is engaging and compelling.

The collection's big turn for the worse comes in "Rollingwood," in which the sad-sack divorced father of a toddler is beset on all sides by the increasingly villainous behavior of everyone he comes in contact with. The story starts off strong and interesting, but soon devolves as the persecutions inflicted on the protagonist become more and more silly and cliched.

"On Not Growing Up" and "My Views on the Darkness" are two similar gag-stories, both relying on the supposed amusement value of applying highfalutin academic language to incongruous topics. Suffice it to say that the joke didn't work for me in either case.

"Watching Mysteries with My Mother" contains neither plot nor character development. It's just a long, emotionless, cud-chewing rumination, devoid of anything to make it engaging.

"The Loyalty Protocol" presents an unreal, vaguely Kafkaesque world, another sad-sack and ever-victimized protagonist, and a host of subsidiary characters who speak and act in ways unlike any remotely realistic human being.

And after this point (about 3/4 through the book), all but one of the remaining stories are purely abstract exercises in surrealism. In plot, events, setting, the behavior of characters, and even the vocabulary, nothing has anything to do with the real world, except perhaps via some secret-decoder-ring language of symbolism. Fiction like this holds no interest for me, so I only skimmed these stories.

The final story is "The Moors," which, somewhat like "Watching Mysteries with My Mother," is a long, uninteresting, and largely silly internal monologue. It comes to a conclusion that I imagine was intended to be amusing and/or pathetic, but "painfully goofy" would better describe the actual effect.

So the overall experience of this book for me was one of hopes raised and then emphatically dashed. Marcus is clearly an author with a lot of range, and his artsy exercises in "experimental" writing may earn him some accolades from academics and others. But personally, despite the one terrific story in this collection, I find him an author I can safely drop into my "ignore" column. ( )