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Leaving the Sea: Stories
From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts—and his range—as never before.
In the hilarious, lacerating “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.
As the collection progresses, we move from more traditional narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form. In these otherworldly landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover total childhood innocence; an automaton discovers love and has to reinvent language to accommodate it; filial loyalty is seen as a dangerous weakness that must be drilled away; and the distance from a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential wasteland, requiring heroic effort.
In these piercing, brilliantly observed investigations into human vulnerability and failure, it is often the most absurd and alien predicaments that capture the deepest truths. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
What have you done? --
I can say many nice things --
The dark arts --
Rollingwood --
On not growing up --
My views on the darkness --
Watching mysteries with my mother --
The loyalty protocol --
The father costume --
First love --
Fear the morning --
Origins of the family --
Against attachment --
Leaving the sea --
The moors
In the hilarious, lacerating “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.
As the collection progresses, we move from more traditional narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form. In these otherworldly landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover total childhood innocence; an automaton discovers love and has to reinvent language to accommodate it; filial loyalty is seen as a dangerous weakness that must be drilled away; and the distance from a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential wasteland, requiring heroic effort.
In these piercing, brilliantly observed investigations into human vulnerability and failure, it is often the most absurd and alien predicaments that capture the deepest truths. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
What have you done? --
I can say many nice things --
The dark arts --
Rollingwood --
On not growing up --
My views on the darkness --
Watching mysteries with my mother --
The loyalty protocol --
The father costume --
First love --
Fear the morning --
Origins of the family --
Against attachment --
Leaving the sea --
The moors
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 7, 2014
72 people are currently reading
2323 people want to read
About the author
Ben Marcus
67 books479 followersSeemingly the most conspicuous aspect of Ben Marcus' work, to date, is its expansion on one of the most primary concerns of the original Surrealist authors -- perhaps most typified by Benjamin Péret, husband of the acclaimed painter Remedios Varo -- this being a very deep interest in the psychological service and implication of symbols and the manners by which those symbols can be maneuvered and rejuxtaposed in order to provoke new ideas or new points of view -- in other words, the creation of, in a sense, conscious dreams.
While Marcus' writing plays similarly with the meanings of words by either stripping them of their intended meaning or juxtaposing them with other words in critical ways, it also abandons the 'experimental' nature of so much of the Surrealists' writing for stories that describe human psychology and the human condition through a means that has in later years become notably more subjective and sensory in nature than that used in the broad range of fiction, both 'conventional' and 'nonconventional'.
The surreal nature of Marcus' work derives in part from the fact that it comprises sentences that are exact in their structure and syntax, but whose words, though familiar, appear to have abandoned their ordinary meanings; they can be read as experiments in the ways in which language and syntax themselves work to create structures of meaning. Common themes that emerge are family, the Midwest, science, mathematics, and religion, although their treatment in Marcus's writing lends to new interpretations and conceptualizations of those concepts.
Marcus was born in Chicago. He attended New York University (NYU) and Brown University, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University where he was recently promoted to head of the writing MFA program. He is the son of Jane Marcus, a noted feminist critic and Virginia Woolf scholar. He is married to novelist Heidi Julavits.
While Marcus' writing plays similarly with the meanings of words by either stripping them of their intended meaning or juxtaposing them with other words in critical ways, it also abandons the 'experimental' nature of so much of the Surrealists' writing for stories that describe human psychology and the human condition through a means that has in later years become notably more subjective and sensory in nature than that used in the broad range of fiction, both 'conventional' and 'nonconventional'.
The surreal nature of Marcus' work derives in part from the fact that it comprises sentences that are exact in their structure and syntax, but whose words, though familiar, appear to have abandoned their ordinary meanings; they can be read as experiments in the ways in which language and syntax themselves work to create structures of meaning. Common themes that emerge are family, the Midwest, science, mathematics, and religion, although their treatment in Marcus's writing lends to new interpretations and conceptualizations of those concepts.
Marcus was born in Chicago. He attended New York University (NYU) and Brown University, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University where he was recently promoted to head of the writing MFA program. He is the son of Jane Marcus, a noted feminist critic and Virginia Woolf scholar. He is married to novelist Heidi Julavits.
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June 25, 2025
Fatherhood has somehow become about helping the boy not love his mother too painfully.
It is often said that it is the ones we love that we hurt—or hurt us—the most. In a collection of short stories that seems proper to place on your bookshelves between George Saunders and David Foster Wallace¹, Ben Marcus’ Leaving the Sea Stories explores this harsh sentiment across a wide range of narrative devices that build with a growing dread and sense of alienation. Marcus deftly employs defamiliarization in his prose, building a nightmare of a reality that seems so detached and foreign while also immediate and familiar. Marcus’ dark humor takes aim at human relationships, particularly the family structure and family destruction, and takes wing with soaring satire.There is much experimentation, and while not all of them fire with majesty, the overall effort and effect is more than deserving of applause. As the collection progresses, Marcus pushes boundaries further and further, experimenting with style and narrative as the horrors of everyday life and human nature come alive through these discomforting and disquieting emotionally-introspective tales of family and survival in a world apathetic towards us.
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
Experimentation in literature is something that should be encouraged and I always enjoy watching an author toy with language and literary devices to tell a story in fresh, new ways. Inevitably, not all experiments prove a success—such is the nature of experimentation—yet it is often through failure that we see the pathways towards success. This is evident in Leaving the Sea as Marcus moves from traditional narratives in the earlier stories (though this is not a flaw of those stories, which ooze with the dread and discomfort across their grim satirization) towards more playful styles and approaches in the second half of the book. Of particular note is section 2 which consists of two stories told through a series of Q&A’s set in a dystopian future (imagine the Somni section of Cloud Atlas featuring a sharp-tongued, sociopathic revolutionary). The later stories have significant breaks from the traditional style that helps to elevate the expression of obfuscation in a modern society where boundaries are difficult to ascertain. Several of the more experimental works, while exciting in their approach, tend to be more a chore to read. The title story, a mere five pages in length, feels nearly too long by half. Told through one run of sentence (until the final paragraph which then has a potent staccato burst of emotional sentences to pierce the heart) consisting of a list of the narrator's actions and life memories that build an image of him as a person through a wonderful, abstract vantage point, the charm of the style wears thin quickly and has a loquacity that induces lethargy in the reader. Additionally, some of the more futuristic stories spend more time creating a haunting and detached future complete with unfamiliar linguistic rules than actually examining the story at hand and come off feeling cumbersome and uneven. However, these experimental frailties do not hinder or plague the collection and their bold inventiveness and creativity are still awe-inspiring. I would be interested to see which stories worked best for other people, as I feel many of the ones I disliked (a few I strongly disliked) could be the favorites of others who may dislike the ones I most enjoyed. A particularly extraordinary success is the Watching Mysteries With my Mother which is a virtually plotless thought experiment as the narrator considers the statistics of his opening statement ‘I don’t think my mother will die today’, guilted by the notion that one’s likelihood of death increases when alone so therefor each time he leaves her home he is putting her more at risk, compounded exponentially with each passing day as her aging also increases her statistical probability, as well as a droll investigation into the plots of BBC mystery films.
When children are yelled at by father, their skin tightens into a grimace over their faces because their bones have grown swollen with his voice.²
Marcus’ satire is sharp as is his wit. Most of these stories feature weak male figures, typically overweight and middle aged, under the thumb of obdurate women and society. Their emotions are suppressed and compressed to the point of near explosion. While the general sense of character doesn’t vary much, Marcus manages to keep a fresh voice though each story, some of them gifted with supreme prose and others more banal having to state that it would ‘take a poet’ to properly express their points. These stories hone in on the faults in the family structure where human closeness seems a vile plague and each person ‘an allergy to himself.’ Fathers are especially targeted for the hurt they can bestow upon their children for their cruelty or inability to wear the role with grace, and wives (current and ex-) are typically cold brick walls to break the heart and soul against in every conversation. We are the children tossed amongst the waves of family failures, and Marcus’ style helps simulate the bewilderment, helplessness and emotional pains of this situation. Much is left unsaid, or just beyond our grasp, like dark truths whose emotional weight is too great for the frailties of language.
While this collection is dark, it is not without its uproarious humor. Particularly I Can Say Nice Things which takes the social satire to literature and the classroom. We follow the disillusioned writing professor as he oversees a creative writing class on board a cruise ship, which makes for an incisive metaphor for the creation of literature (the narrator remarks humorously that sea metaphors work on land but, ironically, out at sea seem terrible). The students are fantastic caricatures of college literary-minded writers and critics, often seen attacking and dismissing the works of others while writing stories themselves that are strangely not at all dissimilar.
While the collection has an uneven feel and several of the stories don’t quite take wing into the heart, Marcus has created a wonderful array of devices and tales that penetrate deep into the human soul. These stories feature characters alienated and emotionally stymied in a world that seems alien to us, but under close inspection after sifting through the gleeful defamiliarization techniques, we find these settings are closer to home that originally thought. This collection is sometimes suffocatingly dark, but the humor is spread well to break the clouds and no matter what the reader is always sure to feel the rays of a bright and bold voice shining down on them.
3.5/5
If I was assigned a death role...you might still hear me disputing the reigning survival narratives, perhaps even arguing that death is the most radical form of survival. It is a necessary imperfection of the species that we each believe we are in the right.
¹The comparison to these authors feels both a justifiable and lazy assessment While Marcus does retain the self-conscious playfulness of Wallace and the eerie mid-life, mid-depression dystopian dramas of Saunders, it is a style—or better, styles&mash;that reverberate in a highly original voice. There is a refined charm that lurks in each story that is distinctly his and the comparisons are meant as complementary instead of shoehorning him into that realm of surrealistic MFA (I suspect the ‘this is too MFA-ey’ remarks will surface in aggressive dismissal of the collection and author) that seems to be an artifact of the modern era of literature. There are times to when a comparison with Don DeLillo also seems adequate, though more in ideas than style, and the bold experimental willingness recalls the spirit of the great Donald Barthelme.
² Much like in his The Flame Alphabet, people are toxic to one another, especially their speech.
It is often said that it is the ones we love that we hurt—or hurt us—the most. In a collection of short stories that seems proper to place on your bookshelves between George Saunders and David Foster Wallace¹, Ben Marcus’ Leaving the Sea Stories explores this harsh sentiment across a wide range of narrative devices that build with a growing dread and sense of alienation. Marcus deftly employs defamiliarization in his prose, building a nightmare of a reality that seems so detached and foreign while also immediate and familiar. Marcus’ dark humor takes aim at human relationships, particularly the family structure and family destruction, and takes wing with soaring satire.There is much experimentation, and while not all of them fire with majesty, the overall effort and effect is more than deserving of applause. As the collection progresses, Marcus pushes boundaries further and further, experimenting with style and narrative as the horrors of everyday life and human nature come alive through these discomforting and disquieting emotionally-introspective tales of family and survival in a world apathetic towards us.
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
Experimentation in literature is something that should be encouraged and I always enjoy watching an author toy with language and literary devices to tell a story in fresh, new ways. Inevitably, not all experiments prove a success—such is the nature of experimentation—yet it is often through failure that we see the pathways towards success. This is evident in Leaving the Sea as Marcus moves from traditional narratives in the earlier stories (though this is not a flaw of those stories, which ooze with the dread and discomfort across their grim satirization) towards more playful styles and approaches in the second half of the book. Of particular note is section 2 which consists of two stories told through a series of Q&A’s set in a dystopian future (imagine the Somni section of Cloud Atlas featuring a sharp-tongued, sociopathic revolutionary). The later stories have significant breaks from the traditional style that helps to elevate the expression of obfuscation in a modern society where boundaries are difficult to ascertain. Several of the more experimental works, while exciting in their approach, tend to be more a chore to read. The title story, a mere five pages in length, feels nearly too long by half. Told through one run of sentence (until the final paragraph which then has a potent staccato burst of emotional sentences to pierce the heart) consisting of a list of the narrator's actions and life memories that build an image of him as a person through a wonderful, abstract vantage point, the charm of the style wears thin quickly and has a loquacity that induces lethargy in the reader. Additionally, some of the more futuristic stories spend more time creating a haunting and detached future complete with unfamiliar linguistic rules than actually examining the story at hand and come off feeling cumbersome and uneven. However, these experimental frailties do not hinder or plague the collection and their bold inventiveness and creativity are still awe-inspiring. I would be interested to see which stories worked best for other people, as I feel many of the ones I disliked (a few I strongly disliked) could be the favorites of others who may dislike the ones I most enjoyed. A particularly extraordinary success is the Watching Mysteries With my Mother which is a virtually plotless thought experiment as the narrator considers the statistics of his opening statement ‘I don’t think my mother will die today’, guilted by the notion that one’s likelihood of death increases when alone so therefor each time he leaves her home he is putting her more at risk, compounded exponentially with each passing day as her aging also increases her statistical probability, as well as a droll investigation into the plots of BBC mystery films.
When children are yelled at by father, their skin tightens into a grimace over their faces because their bones have grown swollen with his voice.²
Marcus’ satire is sharp as is his wit. Most of these stories feature weak male figures, typically overweight and middle aged, under the thumb of obdurate women and society. Their emotions are suppressed and compressed to the point of near explosion. While the general sense of character doesn’t vary much, Marcus manages to keep a fresh voice though each story, some of them gifted with supreme prose and others more banal having to state that it would ‘take a poet’ to properly express their points. These stories hone in on the faults in the family structure where human closeness seems a vile plague and each person ‘an allergy to himself.’ Fathers are especially targeted for the hurt they can bestow upon their children for their cruelty or inability to wear the role with grace, and wives (current and ex-) are typically cold brick walls to break the heart and soul against in every conversation. We are the children tossed amongst the waves of family failures, and Marcus’ style helps simulate the bewilderment, helplessness and emotional pains of this situation. Much is left unsaid, or just beyond our grasp, like dark truths whose emotional weight is too great for the frailties of language.
While this collection is dark, it is not without its uproarious humor. Particularly I Can Say Nice Things which takes the social satire to literature and the classroom. We follow the disillusioned writing professor as he oversees a creative writing class on board a cruise ship, which makes for an incisive metaphor for the creation of literature (the narrator remarks humorously that sea metaphors work on land but, ironically, out at sea seem terrible). The students are fantastic caricatures of college literary-minded writers and critics, often seen attacking and dismissing the works of others while writing stories themselves that are strangely not at all dissimilar.
While the collection has an uneven feel and several of the stories don’t quite take wing into the heart, Marcus has created a wonderful array of devices and tales that penetrate deep into the human soul. These stories feature characters alienated and emotionally stymied in a world that seems alien to us, but under close inspection after sifting through the gleeful defamiliarization techniques, we find these settings are closer to home that originally thought. This collection is sometimes suffocatingly dark, but the humor is spread well to break the clouds and no matter what the reader is always sure to feel the rays of a bright and bold voice shining down on them.
3.5/5
If I was assigned a death role...you might still hear me disputing the reigning survival narratives, perhaps even arguing that death is the most radical form of survival. It is a necessary imperfection of the species that we each believe we are in the right.
¹The comparison to these authors feels both a justifiable and lazy assessment While Marcus does retain the self-conscious playfulness of Wallace and the eerie mid-life, mid-depression dystopian dramas of Saunders, it is a style—or better, styles&mash;that reverberate in a highly original voice. There is a refined charm that lurks in each story that is distinctly his and the comparisons are meant as complementary instead of shoehorning him into that realm of surrealistic MFA (I suspect the ‘this is too MFA-ey’ remarks will surface in aggressive dismissal of the collection and author) that seems to be an artifact of the modern era of literature. There are times to when a comparison with Don DeLillo also seems adequate, though more in ideas than style, and the bold experimental willingness recalls the spirit of the great Donald Barthelme.
² Much like in his The Flame Alphabet, people are toxic to one another, especially their speech.
June 15, 2024
Ben Marcus is weird.
Now, there are many people who might take that as an insult, as the word "weird" is commonly used as a synonym for "strange" or "abnormal", and it often has negative connotations. It is antonymous to the words "normal" or "ordinary", both of which are commonly considered states of being that are preferable to being weird.
I have always thought the opposite: being weird, in my humble opinion, is far preferable to being ordinary or normal. Ordinary is average, plain, mediocre, boring. And who defines normal? Generally, those in the majority define what's normal, which is fine if there is a strict rubric of definition of normal, but, more often than not, normal is defined simply as the conforming actions, behaviors, or states of mind of the majority. So, if a majority of the population believes that slavery is acceptable or that women should not vote or that homosexuals should not be allowed to get married, then that is considered "normal". While the more rational-minded and enlightened minority are labelled "weird" for believing the complete opposite.
Besides all that, weird is just more fun and interesting. Weird takes us out of our comfort zones and makes us think outside the box. Weird challenges us.
Marcus is a weird writer in the way that David Lynch is a weird director or that David Bowie is a weird singer/songwriter/musician. They have all certainly bucked the mainstream in their careers, creating art that is often uncomfortable, fascinating, beautiful, and thought-provoking, which is what all good art should do.
Marcus's latest book of short stories, "Leaving the Sea", certainly attempts to buck the mainstream literary "normal" in much the same way his experimental novel "The Flame Alphabet" did, by dissecting and deconstructing the form and function of the novel. In this case, Marcus is deconstructing the form and function of the short story in fifteen short pieces, some of which, at their most accessible, could easily be called stories, while others do not in any way resemble a traditional short story. Yet, even at their weirdest, Marcus's stories all make compelling examinations and criticisms of language (again, much like "The Flame Alphabet") and vividly illustrate the theater of the absurd that we call life.
The stories, in some ways, evolve (or devolve, depending on one's perspective) from most comprehensible to least comprehensible. His first story, "What Have You Done?" is a seemingly straightforward narrative about a young man named Paul who comes back home to Cleveland to visit his estranged family. Over the course of the story, one learns that Paul did something in his past to shatter the family's trust in him, and the family's attempts to walk on eggshells around him only makes things worse. It is a disturbing story, mainly because the story's closure offers no real closure at all, which seems to be a motif for the rest of the stories in the book.
Indeed, Marcus seems to return, again and again and in ever-increasing levels of dread and terror, to this idea of isolation and exodus, as is evoked in the title. Like primordial man, leaving the sea to walk on land, contemporary man faces the next step in our evolution. It's unclear what shape that next step will take, but it is clear that it will be just as terrifying and lonely for us as it was for our primordial ancestors.
Not that all of Marcus's stories are terrifying. Humor (albeit a very strange sense of one) threads itself throughout all the stories. Some of it is, of course, very dark, but there are a few that may make one actually chuckle. For example, "On Not Growing Up" is a Philip K. Dick-ian tale set in a near future where the problems of society and the world have become so vast and unsolvable, that there is a growing movement to return to a child-like state of being and mind in order to escape the responsibilities and stresses of adulthood. In another similar futuristic story, "My Views on the Darkness", the narrator (who is being interviewed by the author) tells about how he simply escapes reality by literally living in a cave.
The final story "The Moors" is both uncomfortable and humorous, as it describes, for one man, his almost animalistic but totally awkward and disturbing attempt to talk to and seduce (and possibly mate with) a young intern in the break room at work. The room, in his mind, becomes a jungle setting and the young girl becomes his prey. But he quickly finds himself overanalyzing the situation until he is petrified with total inaction.
Marcus at his weirdest and most fascinating is his experiments with language and the very meaning of words ("The Father Costume") and/or the purpose of telling stories in the first place ("Watching Mysteries with my Mother").
"Leaving the Sea" won't be for everyone. If you hate the films of David Lynch, don't much care for the music of Bowie, and have tried---unsuccessfully---to read the works of authors like Franz Kafka or David Foster Wallace, then this book probably isn't for you. Marcus's weirdness is probably an acquired taste, and that's okay.
Now, there are many people who might take that as an insult, as the word "weird" is commonly used as a synonym for "strange" or "abnormal", and it often has negative connotations. It is antonymous to the words "normal" or "ordinary", both of which are commonly considered states of being that are preferable to being weird.
I have always thought the opposite: being weird, in my humble opinion, is far preferable to being ordinary or normal. Ordinary is average, plain, mediocre, boring. And who defines normal? Generally, those in the majority define what's normal, which is fine if there is a strict rubric of definition of normal, but, more often than not, normal is defined simply as the conforming actions, behaviors, or states of mind of the majority. So, if a majority of the population believes that slavery is acceptable or that women should not vote or that homosexuals should not be allowed to get married, then that is considered "normal". While the more rational-minded and enlightened minority are labelled "weird" for believing the complete opposite.
Besides all that, weird is just more fun and interesting. Weird takes us out of our comfort zones and makes us think outside the box. Weird challenges us.
Marcus is a weird writer in the way that David Lynch is a weird director or that David Bowie is a weird singer/songwriter/musician. They have all certainly bucked the mainstream in their careers, creating art that is often uncomfortable, fascinating, beautiful, and thought-provoking, which is what all good art should do.
Marcus's latest book of short stories, "Leaving the Sea", certainly attempts to buck the mainstream literary "normal" in much the same way his experimental novel "The Flame Alphabet" did, by dissecting and deconstructing the form and function of the novel. In this case, Marcus is deconstructing the form and function of the short story in fifteen short pieces, some of which, at their most accessible, could easily be called stories, while others do not in any way resemble a traditional short story. Yet, even at their weirdest, Marcus's stories all make compelling examinations and criticisms of language (again, much like "The Flame Alphabet") and vividly illustrate the theater of the absurd that we call life.
The stories, in some ways, evolve (or devolve, depending on one's perspective) from most comprehensible to least comprehensible. His first story, "What Have You Done?" is a seemingly straightforward narrative about a young man named Paul who comes back home to Cleveland to visit his estranged family. Over the course of the story, one learns that Paul did something in his past to shatter the family's trust in him, and the family's attempts to walk on eggshells around him only makes things worse. It is a disturbing story, mainly because the story's closure offers no real closure at all, which seems to be a motif for the rest of the stories in the book.
Indeed, Marcus seems to return, again and again and in ever-increasing levels of dread and terror, to this idea of isolation and exodus, as is evoked in the title. Like primordial man, leaving the sea to walk on land, contemporary man faces the next step in our evolution. It's unclear what shape that next step will take, but it is clear that it will be just as terrifying and lonely for us as it was for our primordial ancestors.
Not that all of Marcus's stories are terrifying. Humor (albeit a very strange sense of one) threads itself throughout all the stories. Some of it is, of course, very dark, but there are a few that may make one actually chuckle. For example, "On Not Growing Up" is a Philip K. Dick-ian tale set in a near future where the problems of society and the world have become so vast and unsolvable, that there is a growing movement to return to a child-like state of being and mind in order to escape the responsibilities and stresses of adulthood. In another similar futuristic story, "My Views on the Darkness", the narrator (who is being interviewed by the author) tells about how he simply escapes reality by literally living in a cave.
The final story "The Moors" is both uncomfortable and humorous, as it describes, for one man, his almost animalistic but totally awkward and disturbing attempt to talk to and seduce (and possibly mate with) a young intern in the break room at work. The room, in his mind, becomes a jungle setting and the young girl becomes his prey. But he quickly finds himself overanalyzing the situation until he is petrified with total inaction.
Marcus at his weirdest and most fascinating is his experiments with language and the very meaning of words ("The Father Costume") and/or the purpose of telling stories in the first place ("Watching Mysteries with my Mother").
"Leaving the Sea" won't be for everyone. If you hate the films of David Lynch, don't much care for the music of Bowie, and have tried---unsuccessfully---to read the works of authors like Franz Kafka or David Foster Wallace, then this book probably isn't for you. Marcus's weirdness is probably an acquired taste, and that's okay.
May 9, 2018
Dangerously perfect. Perfectly dangerous. This, my 3rd Marcus, solidifies my enthrallment to his project. There is more flirtation with straightforward narrative in some of these stories, yet the propensity (and abundance!) of unthinkable juxtapositions remains undiminished throughout the rather more conversational exposition of what could, considering the oeuvre, not too ostentatiously be dubbed the Marcusian worldview. To my taste, Marcus has ruminated the best bits of authors in a big field, and the contemporary cud he's brewing now is incomparably delectable, the humus of decades moldering in the readerly maw. Alongside the eponymous linguistic hijinks, there is a more inviting humor at play; Marcus has always been "funny," but not necessarily comical. At moments I was certain I was witnessing the efflorescence of a mutant DeLillo.
The Word giveth and the Word taketh away. Such is the unholy homily resounding in Marcus's tragicomedy, featuring not the standard protagonist/antagonist or subject/object dichotomy, but the relentless trans-dimensional enmeshing of signifiers and signified. "What's the point?!" cry unduly confounded detractors. What indeed--we're just looking, thanks! It's an unmapped constellation of perception, consciousness, language, and desire. For you and me, it starts at our birth and ends with our death, but since that's impossibly abstract, let's experiment with it between the front and back covers. Or hell, even just a rejuvenating quickie between the First Letter and the punctuation that completes the thought.
Let me try concision instead of rhapsody: Marcus is proving that in addition to his vanguard vernacular, he can write about things everybody else writes about--family, sex, love, regret, Things--in a way that reveals still more of their wonderful strangeness. A writer who reveals the everyday in a way we've never seen, not to mention the Yesterdays and Tomorrows he makes imaginable, is the dearest of the scant joys remaining to readers.
The Word giveth and the Word taketh away. Such is the unholy homily resounding in Marcus's tragicomedy, featuring not the standard protagonist/antagonist or subject/object dichotomy, but the relentless trans-dimensional enmeshing of signifiers and signified. "What's the point?!" cry unduly confounded detractors. What indeed--we're just looking, thanks! It's an unmapped constellation of perception, consciousness, language, and desire. For you and me, it starts at our birth and ends with our death, but since that's impossibly abstract, let's experiment with it between the front and back covers. Or hell, even just a rejuvenating quickie between the First Letter and the punctuation that completes the thought.
Let me try concision instead of rhapsody: Marcus is proving that in addition to his vanguard vernacular, he can write about things everybody else writes about--family, sex, love, regret, Things--in a way that reveals still more of their wonderful strangeness. A writer who reveals the everyday in a way we've never seen, not to mention the Yesterdays and Tomorrows he makes imaginable, is the dearest of the scant joys remaining to readers.
February 8, 2014
I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway. I think I will review these stories one by one, with the goal of reading one a day.
1. "What Have You Done?" Paul, the protagonist, is an asshole. By his own account. He's back home for a reunion with his family of origin: his father is afraid of him; his sister loathes him; his mother both fears and dislikes him, but also loves him. For Paul, "home" means "the place where everyone knows the very worst aspects of you and still let you back in because the rules say they have to." Home means you can't get away from your worst self. Like George Saunders, Marcus manages to be both grim and hilarious at once. One criticism (or question): there's an ambulance and stretcher in this story that clearly are there for some reason (it comes up twice) but I never caught what the reason was.
2. "I Can Say Many Nice Things." Title is a reference to a phone conversation between sad-sack protag, Fleming, and his bitchy wife, Erin. He asks her to say something nice, and that's how she responds. As in, "I can say many nice things, just not about you." It's also a reference to Fleming's MO with his writing students: he wants desperately to be liked by them so he will say Many Nice Things about their writing, none of which he means. If I can detect a theme from only two stories, it seems to be one of "provider angst." No matter how hard a man works, it will never be enough to impress strangers and certainly not enough to impress family. You are a failure before you're even out of the gate, with the self-loathing to prove it. Good times! I feel like I'm reading Ed Norton's character from Fight Club, before Brad Pitt's character shows up.
3. "The Dark Arts." My favorite so far. Same theme of sad-sack protagonist failing to navigate a hostile world. Fathers are always a problem and your girlfriend/wife hates you, justifiably. This story laden with quotable sentences and wry observations. (Tombstone.) Julian's thoughts on German vs. English were worth the price of the book alone. (Well. It was free. But you know what I mean.)
4. "Rollingwood." A tragedy of errors. I almost found Mather's descent into Hell too hard to read until I just gave into it: OK, this is a story in which every terrible thing that can happen to a guy happens. I disconnected from the viewpoint character and read it as more of an exercise in character torture. And then it was almost entertaining.
5/6: "On Not Growing Up" and "My Views on Darkness." This second section is written like less-funny "Shouts & Murmers" columns in the New Yorker; i.e., faux interviews with ridiculous people. In the first case, the ridiculous person is a man who is making a serious intellectual case for not growing up. He has remained an infant for 71 years. (At least in temperament: he's working on the physical bit.) The second interview is with a man who takes survivalism to a new extreme: he lives in a cave, surrounded on all sides by stone; it's the only risk-free way to get through a day. His is also written as an earnest intellectual argument. As he pleads his cause, one is reminded of the kinds of twisted arguments academics make when asked to defend fringe views. I'm glad this section is only two stories long. It took a lot of concentration to get through these.
7. "Watching Mysteries with My Mother." More of an essay than a story, in that nothing happens except thoughts in the narrator's head. He's sitting with his elderly mother, watching PBS mysteries, thinking about her eventual death and his relationship to that event. The stream of consciousness feels real enough, and he's got loads of clever observations about death, the British mystery genre, and cliches, but I got bored after five pages. And the story is 18 pages. (!) I skimmed to the end. I hope the rest of this third section isn't more of the same.
8. "The Loyalty Protocol." This one has events, yay. It reads exactly like a George Saunders short story, which is always a good thing. You don't really know what's going on and it's never explained, but enough clues are casually offered up to form a picture. Characters react to disaster in counterintuitive ways. Very strange events ("At Edward's office the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died.") are offered up casually, as if they're unexceptional. I enjoyed the combination of eerie (bioterrorism, evacuations) and funny (confusing Gandhi with Hitler).
9. "The Father Costume." I'm pretty sure this story was written using Mad Libs.
10. "First Love." There is a Star Trek TNG episode called "Darmok" about an alien race that communicates only through metaphor. That's what this story is. The narrator lives in a distant future (that still contains an "America," interestingly) when language has completely altered. It's an interesting lens through which to tell a fairly standard relationship story: meeting a girl, sleeping with her, falling in love, cheating on her, coping with recrimination. You have to work to understand what's happening (seems to be a theme with Marcus's writing) but not nearly as hard as the impenetrable "Father Costume."
11. "Fear the Morning." Still life with perv? Instead of being in a language-shifted future or post-apocalyptic hell, our weird world here seems to be inside the head of a crazy person. I have just come across a review that refers to Marcus's work as "Kafkaesque" and I don't know why I didn't see that earlier. Yes. The Atlantic did an interview with Marcus, and here they paraphrase Marcus's take on Kafka: "Kafka’s quintessential qualities are affecting use of language, a setting that straddles fantasy and reality, and a sense of striving even in the face of bleakness—hopelessly and full of hope." The experimental stories in this collection follow that to a T.
12. "Origins of the Family." Assignment: write a short story in which normal things happen, but must be described as metaphors involving the word "bone." Good luck.
13. "Against Attachment." "We met inside the clear globules of fat known as air. There was no milk in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocked-sized emissary named 'Joe' introduced us. I did not love myself." Uh-huh. If that makes any sense to you, or gives you pleasure, this is the book for you.
14. "Leaving the Sea." I kind of liked this one. It's a six-page-long sentence (plus a few at the end), and is essentially a prose poem. But it's not an entirely abstract piece, like #13 and #9. There's a shape to it. At this point, though, I do worry about Mr. Marcus a bit; he doesn't seem a well man.
15. "The Moors." Is there a reason, even a bad one, for making this story so long? A fat man follows his pretty nameless colleague into the coffee-break room, a room from which the name of the story comes. It's a meditation on dread, nihilsm, and self-loathing, as are all these stories, but it's just so loooong.
Overall thoughts: postmodernist, experimental fiction, perfect for those who enjoy such things. Starts with more traditional narrative, but each story seems to break down more and more until you're lost in a word salad, almost totally abstract. I can't really imagine anyone liking that sort of thing, but some reviewers seem to. The craft in the accessible stories is unmistakeable, 5 stars for artistry there: Marcus has chops. I feel a little bit bad about downgrading it to 3 stars for being simply unlovable, since the reader is clearly meant to rise above such petty considerations, but there you have it.
1. "What Have You Done?" Paul, the protagonist, is an asshole. By his own account. He's back home for a reunion with his family of origin: his father is afraid of him; his sister loathes him; his mother both fears and dislikes him, but also loves him. For Paul, "home" means "the place where everyone knows the very worst aspects of you and still let you back in because the rules say they have to." Home means you can't get away from your worst self. Like George Saunders, Marcus manages to be both grim and hilarious at once. One criticism (or question): there's an ambulance and stretcher in this story that clearly are there for some reason (it comes up twice) but I never caught what the reason was.
2. "I Can Say Many Nice Things." Title is a reference to a phone conversation between sad-sack protag, Fleming, and his bitchy wife, Erin. He asks her to say something nice, and that's how she responds. As in, "I can say many nice things, just not about you." It's also a reference to Fleming's MO with his writing students: he wants desperately to be liked by them so he will say Many Nice Things about their writing, none of which he means. If I can detect a theme from only two stories, it seems to be one of "provider angst." No matter how hard a man works, it will never be enough to impress strangers and certainly not enough to impress family. You are a failure before you're even out of the gate, with the self-loathing to prove it. Good times! I feel like I'm reading Ed Norton's character from Fight Club, before Brad Pitt's character shows up.
3. "The Dark Arts." My favorite so far. Same theme of sad-sack protagonist failing to navigate a hostile world. Fathers are always a problem and your girlfriend/wife hates you, justifiably. This story laden with quotable sentences and wry observations. (Tombstone.) Julian's thoughts on German vs. English were worth the price of the book alone. (Well. It was free. But you know what I mean.)
4. "Rollingwood." A tragedy of errors. I almost found Mather's descent into Hell too hard to read until I just gave into it: OK, this is a story in which every terrible thing that can happen to a guy happens. I disconnected from the viewpoint character and read it as more of an exercise in character torture. And then it was almost entertaining.
5/6: "On Not Growing Up" and "My Views on Darkness." This second section is written like less-funny "Shouts & Murmers" columns in the New Yorker; i.e., faux interviews with ridiculous people. In the first case, the ridiculous person is a man who is making a serious intellectual case for not growing up. He has remained an infant for 71 years. (At least in temperament: he's working on the physical bit.) The second interview is with a man who takes survivalism to a new extreme: he lives in a cave, surrounded on all sides by stone; it's the only risk-free way to get through a day. His is also written as an earnest intellectual argument. As he pleads his cause, one is reminded of the kinds of twisted arguments academics make when asked to defend fringe views. I'm glad this section is only two stories long. It took a lot of concentration to get through these.
7. "Watching Mysteries with My Mother." More of an essay than a story, in that nothing happens except thoughts in the narrator's head. He's sitting with his elderly mother, watching PBS mysteries, thinking about her eventual death and his relationship to that event. The stream of consciousness feels real enough, and he's got loads of clever observations about death, the British mystery genre, and cliches, but I got bored after five pages. And the story is 18 pages. (!) I skimmed to the end. I hope the rest of this third section isn't more of the same.
8. "The Loyalty Protocol." This one has events, yay. It reads exactly like a George Saunders short story, which is always a good thing. You don't really know what's going on and it's never explained, but enough clues are casually offered up to form a picture. Characters react to disaster in counterintuitive ways. Very strange events ("At Edward's office the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died.") are offered up casually, as if they're unexceptional. I enjoyed the combination of eerie (bioterrorism, evacuations) and funny (confusing Gandhi with Hitler).
9. "The Father Costume." I'm pretty sure this story was written using Mad Libs.
10. "First Love." There is a Star Trek TNG episode called "Darmok" about an alien race that communicates only through metaphor. That's what this story is. The narrator lives in a distant future (that still contains an "America," interestingly) when language has completely altered. It's an interesting lens through which to tell a fairly standard relationship story: meeting a girl, sleeping with her, falling in love, cheating on her, coping with recrimination. You have to work to understand what's happening (seems to be a theme with Marcus's writing) but not nearly as hard as the impenetrable "Father Costume."
11. "Fear the Morning." Still life with perv? Instead of being in a language-shifted future or post-apocalyptic hell, our weird world here seems to be inside the head of a crazy person. I have just come across a review that refers to Marcus's work as "Kafkaesque" and I don't know why I didn't see that earlier. Yes. The Atlantic did an interview with Marcus, and here they paraphrase Marcus's take on Kafka: "Kafka’s quintessential qualities are affecting use of language, a setting that straddles fantasy and reality, and a sense of striving even in the face of bleakness—hopelessly and full of hope." The experimental stories in this collection follow that to a T.
12. "Origins of the Family." Assignment: write a short story in which normal things happen, but must be described as metaphors involving the word "bone." Good luck.
13. "Against Attachment." "We met inside the clear globules of fat known as air. There was no milk in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocked-sized emissary named 'Joe' introduced us. I did not love myself." Uh-huh. If that makes any sense to you, or gives you pleasure, this is the book for you.
14. "Leaving the Sea." I kind of liked this one. It's a six-page-long sentence (plus a few at the end), and is essentially a prose poem. But it's not an entirely abstract piece, like #13 and #9. There's a shape to it. At this point, though, I do worry about Mr. Marcus a bit; he doesn't seem a well man.
15. "The Moors." Is there a reason, even a bad one, for making this story so long? A fat man follows his pretty nameless colleague into the coffee-break room, a room from which the name of the story comes. It's a meditation on dread, nihilsm, and self-loathing, as are all these stories, but it's just so loooong.
Overall thoughts: postmodernist, experimental fiction, perfect for those who enjoy such things. Starts with more traditional narrative, but each story seems to break down more and more until you're lost in a word salad, almost totally abstract. I can't really imagine anyone liking that sort of thing, but some reviewers seem to. The craft in the accessible stories is unmistakeable, 5 stars for artistry there: Marcus has chops. I feel a little bit bad about downgrading it to 3 stars for being simply unlovable, since the reader is clearly meant to rise above such petty considerations, but there you have it.
February 23, 2014
Dear Ben Marcus,
You did it to me again. I can't believe I let you. Fool me twice... I can just imagine your agent on this book. " Ya know, how about a couple of good New Yorker lite stories to starrt the book. Reel 'em in." You: "Yeah and then I can get to the real heart of my stuff - those Beckett-like dystopian tone poems!" Blech. I should have known after reading part of the Flame Alphabet. In love with your ideas, but your characters are made out of dust and pencil shavings. No fire, just alphabetical acrobatics. A five page story of two sentences? Congrats, you did it! Gimme back my ten minutes. You seem to want to write Kafka's stories with Joyce's pen. I have a hard enough time reading those two sometimes. And you are neither. I give you one more star than you deserve for fooling me. Again. Damn you and the punctuation you rode in on and on and on.
You did it to me again. I can't believe I let you. Fool me twice... I can just imagine your agent on this book. " Ya know, how about a couple of good New Yorker lite stories to starrt the book. Reel 'em in." You: "Yeah and then I can get to the real heart of my stuff - those Beckett-like dystopian tone poems!" Blech. I should have known after reading part of the Flame Alphabet. In love with your ideas, but your characters are made out of dust and pencil shavings. No fire, just alphabetical acrobatics. A five page story of two sentences? Congrats, you did it! Gimme back my ten minutes. You seem to want to write Kafka's stories with Joyce's pen. I have a hard enough time reading those two sometimes. And you are neither. I give you one more star than you deserve for fooling me. Again. Damn you and the punctuation you rode in on and on and on.
October 26, 2017
(3.5) Ben Marcus was recommended to me years ago by a friend who rarely reads fiction. I probably should have taken the recommendation earlier, but who can really tell when the right time is to follow up on a recommendation. I am reading him now and that is that. My conclusion about Leaving the Sea is that it’s one of the more interesting contemporary short story collections I’ve read. I can’t say that every one of these stories held me riveted, but even the ones that didn’t particularly appeal to me still displayed a smart and original mind operating with an inventive use of language. Marcus seems best to me when crafting contemporary tales of characters trudging stolidly on in the face of increasingly absurd and unjust circumstances. And, yes, some of Kafka’s characters come to mind in these stories, which feel more modernist in nature than many of the others in the collection. These characters are alienated, misunderstood, weighted down with responsibility, and unable to effectively make their case heard to those who would oppress them (which is quite possibly everyone). Some of the other stories felt a bit like Marcus just rambling on about some esoteric psychological issue he is obsessed with probing. Others are vague dystopic tales, light on worldbuilding and focused instead on the interpersonal. At times Marcus appears to be translating human relationships and all of their attendant actions and reactions into irreal structures of varying degrees of opacity. Sometimes this works well, while other times it feels too arbitrary to hold significance. My favorite story was probably the last one, ‘The Moors,’ also the longest, I believe, about one lab worker’s excruciating trip to the office coffee cart. It had me laughing out loud, whereas the bits of humor I found elsewhere in the collection merely elicited an occasional smirk, though in fairness they were wide smirks. My interest has been piqued enough to read The Flame Alphabet in the not-too-distant future.
April 6, 2014
So good. Like, really fucking good.
January 6, 2022
What good would it do me to grab on to you if we're both falling?
>We've been banning the wrong books. p121
Let's say you were to decide to read this book. Maybe you liked the cover, and /or the title; maybe you liked The Flame Alphabet or maybe a friend recommended it. Ask yourself, what kind of friend? You might be as surprised as I was to find out that this book was published almost a decade ago.
But whatever brought you here, here we are and the first story, once we have figured out what actually is going on, is kind of heartbreaking. We might decide to read it again with the knowledge gained over the last few pages. How well do really know Paul?
You might not notice it, but the people you have scared will flinch. p27
The second story seems easier to understand. Fleming has taken a job on cruise ship facilitating a writers group, leaving his wife and child at home. Existential questions are raised. The sexually aggressive student is rejected. From their phone calls, we infer the marriage seems strained.
What happened to him needed to be revised until he could find it believable. Or, he needed to be revised...to change himself so that what was real did not seem so alien and wrong. p57
What we don't expect is for Fleming, who tries so hard to do the decent thing, to go into full throttle meltdown.
Do you do that with tools, with your hands, with a bag over your head? Do you do that by standing on the ships railing at night? p57
Disquieted, we might be a bit skittish by now and maybe some readers will want to skip over the third story, The Dark Arts. But no, its not about noxious spells, no witches or wizards, just Julian, feeling jilted, waiting for Hayley to show up. The signs of his unhingement are at first subtle.
He'd long ago lost track of how he was supposed to feel....
Did everyone just clench their teeth and endure it? p73
Part two kicks off with perhaps the one story I could enjoy with the irony clearly discernable and a theme dear to my heart.
I'd like to shed the strictures of adulthood and make maturity an optional result of a freely lived human life, not the necessary path to power and success, lorded over by depressed, overweight, unimaginative corpses. p116
Perhaps you might be amused or maybe offended by now but certainly, like me, you might be feeling a bit anxious, trying to conceptualize the next story, My Views on Darkness. The interview format is used again here to give a rather sinister credibility to the scenario.
Feelings are a gift, and I am lucky. In some sense, my feelings towards my wife and children are more intense when the moment is not complicated by their presence. p123
Part 3 then comes as no surprise. In fact, the mother in Watching Movies With My Mother is the closest to a delightful character this book has to offer. If you have a bleak sense of humour, you might find a few laughs while gloating over the various neuroses of the son.
A family is depicted in the next story, but don't be too quick to slot this one into a dystopian nightmare. The Loyalty Protocol is constantly being revised.
They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing., at last. No matter how false and strange things were, Edward always thought it was smarter, in the end, to believe they were real. p171
He was no longer sure what, exactly, he was supposed to fear. p173
And so to Part 4 and the Father Costume. Here a bloated imagination takes over. Are you still here? From now on it will take some determination to read through the rest of these stories.
I won't encourage you, but if you are in good mental health and have other books and maybe even some people you like around, you will not drown.
And although I do not understand the words, I enjoy their defeat of silence. I can picture the costume the words would make...a costume you would not know you were wearing. So subtle. So soft. ..made only of little words. p194
Part 5 may fool you into thinking it might offer some solace. Do beware. Do not read the story called First Love if you are indeed in love. But here is something to consider, from The Origin of the Family:
Bones prevent the heart from beating so loudly it would deafen the person. p209
"If I were something better, that had never tried to leave the sea" p221 the narrator finally confesses in the title story. But it wasn't until the last story, The Moors, stalled in the horrors of the office coffee room, when it dawned on me, that Paul and Julian and Edward and all the other hopeless narrators were versions of the same character and my increasing claustrophobia was due to being trapped in a labyrinthine paranoid fantasy.
How did one share such imaginings? p257
Did it actually matter that these things had not, and would not happen? p260
There were laws to be evoked, certainly, yet the fuck if he knew what they were. p251
November 9, 2014
Definitely one of the weirdest books of short stories I've ever read. Hooo boy. This is like George Saunders, but to an even more extreme, dissociative level. The main word I would use to describe these stories is alienating. It is like a freaking bad drug trip. Some of the shorter pieces come off as experimental prose-poetry. All of these sentences are intended as awe-struck compliments.
Here's a recap, story by story:
"What Have You Done?" - One of the more traditional stories. Admirable for the way in which it makes you sympathize with (and even pity) such a non-sympathetic main character.
"I Can Say Many Nice Things" - Probably my favorite piece, if only for the fact that it follows a writer teaching a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. I LOVED the bitter, twisted humor in this story, and also the way a murder-mystery is presented and then never solved.
"The Dark Arts" - Another one of the most intense and stronger stories, about a man abroad seeking treatment for a severe medical condition. The ending is particularly haunting. I liked this passage a lot too: "Did other people, he wondered, feel this same way--listless, strange, anxious, dull scared, you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives--and did everyone else just clench their jaws and endure it? Suit up for the day and fight it out on the streets? Were people barely okay and yet not running, as he did, to the doctor, again and again, and was no one discussing, out of some deep personal bravery, what they were so quietly and politely enduring?"
"Rollingwood" - My other favorite piece. A dystopic nightmare about dealing with a single father dealing with a sick child and a hostile workplace. The satire here is freaking brutal in a way that never comes off as hokey or annoying.
"On Not Growing Up" and "My Views on the Darkness" - OK, this is one shit starts to get weird. Both of these stories are narrated Q&A style and are stuffed to the gills with Kafka creepiness. Here are the first questions from each story: "How long have you been a child?" (the answer is "Seventy-one years"), and "People are pursuing different strategies during the hardship, and yours would seem among the most severe. How long have you advocated the cave?"
"Watching Mysteries With My Mother" - This is possibly the most straightforward story, which isn't saying much. Killer opening sentence: "I don't think my mother will die today."
"The Loyalty Protocol" - A dystopic tale concerning aging parents and apocalyptic gym evacuation drills, this is another one of my favorites.
"The Father Costume" - Wow, I don't even know what to say about this one. It was like reading a nightmare mixed with David Foster Wallace.
"First Love," "Fear the Morning," "Origins of the Family," "Against Attachment," "Leaving the Sea" - Definitely the most experimental (and interestingly the shortest) pieces in the book. I'm lumping them together because they felt linked in an odd surreal way to me. They all dealt with language, alienation, romance. The title one in particular I'm going to have to reread.
"The Moors" - Wow, was this a tough read for me, but I think it paid off in the end. The last time I felt this trapped in a character's third-person consciousness was David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person." How the hell does Marcus come up with this stuff?
In conclusion, this is... freaking weird and undeniably new. Believe the hype. I want to read more of him, and I think I have to reread him again.
Here's a recap, story by story:
"What Have You Done?" - One of the more traditional stories. Admirable for the way in which it makes you sympathize with (and even pity) such a non-sympathetic main character.
"I Can Say Many Nice Things" - Probably my favorite piece, if only for the fact that it follows a writer teaching a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. I LOVED the bitter, twisted humor in this story, and also the way a murder-mystery is presented and then never solved.
"The Dark Arts" - Another one of the most intense and stronger stories, about a man abroad seeking treatment for a severe medical condition. The ending is particularly haunting. I liked this passage a lot too: "Did other people, he wondered, feel this same way--listless, strange, anxious, dull scared, you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives--and did everyone else just clench their jaws and endure it? Suit up for the day and fight it out on the streets? Were people barely okay and yet not running, as he did, to the doctor, again and again, and was no one discussing, out of some deep personal bravery, what they were so quietly and politely enduring?"
"Rollingwood" - My other favorite piece. A dystopic nightmare about dealing with a single father dealing with a sick child and a hostile workplace. The satire here is freaking brutal in a way that never comes off as hokey or annoying.
"On Not Growing Up" and "My Views on the Darkness" - OK, this is one shit starts to get weird. Both of these stories are narrated Q&A style and are stuffed to the gills with Kafka creepiness. Here are the first questions from each story: "How long have you been a child?" (the answer is "Seventy-one years"), and "People are pursuing different strategies during the hardship, and yours would seem among the most severe. How long have you advocated the cave?"
"Watching Mysteries With My Mother" - This is possibly the most straightforward story, which isn't saying much. Killer opening sentence: "I don't think my mother will die today."
"The Loyalty Protocol" - A dystopic tale concerning aging parents and apocalyptic gym evacuation drills, this is another one of my favorites.
"The Father Costume" - Wow, I don't even know what to say about this one. It was like reading a nightmare mixed with David Foster Wallace.
"First Love," "Fear the Morning," "Origins of the Family," "Against Attachment," "Leaving the Sea" - Definitely the most experimental (and interestingly the shortest) pieces in the book. I'm lumping them together because they felt linked in an odd surreal way to me. They all dealt with language, alienation, romance. The title one in particular I'm going to have to reread.
"The Moors" - Wow, was this a tough read for me, but I think it paid off in the end. The last time I felt this trapped in a character's third-person consciousness was David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person." How the hell does Marcus come up with this stuff?
In conclusion, this is... freaking weird and undeniably new. Believe the hype. I want to read more of him, and I think I have to reread him again.
February 9, 2015
The characters in the early stories got progressively more miserable. Then the stories just got weird and too experimental. It seemed like Marcus was seeing how far he could go and still have readers. I finished it because I would not have made my Goodreads Challenge goal for the year if I didn't finish it. So there you go. Also, there's one story that is 6 or 7 pages long and the first sentence fills all but the entire last page. I think is my first and last Ben Marcus read.
August 18, 2015
strange and surreal stories
Read
January 25, 2024Uneven collection, imo on a first read. I prefer when Marcus really pushes his language—like Age of Wire and Stringish, but in this collection, he shows that he can write a plain old conventional short story as well, like “The Dark Arts” and “The Loyalty Protocol.”
For me, his best stories in this collection are from the middle sections: “The Father Costume,” “First Love,” “Fear the Morning,” “Origins of the Family” and “Against Attachment.”
For me, his best stories in this collection are from the middle sections: “The Father Costume,” “First Love,” “Fear the Morning,” “Origins of the Family” and “Against Attachment.”
June 4, 2024
Not to be a hater or anything but I think I hated that book … and I read the whole thing (it was very hard to do)
February 3, 2014
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainme...
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, 17 January 2014
The stories in Ben Marcus’ new collection are sometimes riveting and sometimes tedious — such as the title story that is six pages and one sentence long. The stories sometimes are realistic, sometimes dip a toe in the fantastic and sometimes venture so far into another world that the characters aren’t recognizably human.
Marcus established himself as an innovative fictioneer through three acclaimed books, including 2012’s The Flame Alphabet. As I read this collection, I’d enjoy a string of stories and then hit upon one that baffled me, such as “My Views on the Darkness,” written in the form of a Q&A, set during some ominous event known as “the hardship.”
A reader’s views on Leaving the Sea might shift story by story or even page by page. Marcus told Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, that when he looked back at his recent stories and planned this collection, “I realized how many other kinds of stories I wanted to write. I saw huge holes and limitations in what I’d done.”
If Marcus’ goal was to make each of these 15 stories completely different in style, length, tone and position on the realism spectrum, he’s accomplished his mission. But for a reader, it can be a bumpy ride. These stories are by turns entertaining, difficult, hilarious, puzzling, sweet and sad.
Those that gripped me most usually fell on the more realistic or funnier side of Marcus’ oeuvre. In “What Have You Done?” a former sad-sack named Paul flies home to Cleveland for a family reunion. He has a good job, a wife and a baby, but his parents don’t know this, and when he mentions them, they don’t believe him because he’s lied so often in the past. Bitter Paul notices that his family has erased all signs of him from his former room, which now looks like “a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking.” The genius of this story is that everyone reacts to Paul as if he once did something unspeakably horrible, but except for a few hints, we never learn what exactly this was. He’s seared in his extended family’s memory as a volatile screw-up.
In “The Dark Arts,” a young man suffering from an autoimmune disorder is in Germany undergoing experimental therapies that he can’t afford while staying in a creepy hostel and waiting for his girlfriend to show up as promised. In “Rollingwood,” a divorced father does his best to fend for his asthmatic son but can’t catch a break from his ex-wife, co-workers, boss or the world. “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” is the touching and loopy story of a grown son who watches PBS with his elderly mother and interweaves his tangled anxieties and thoughts about life with her amusing analysis of the shows. All of these stories are sad, mysterious and beautiful.
One of my favorites, the hilarious “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” is about a writer forced to teach a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. When he sees the ship’s welcome packet in his room, he thinks, “More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of [my] books or stories.” Marcus captures the agony of teaching such a class, as the teacher tries to draw students into participation, fend off the overfriendly ones and balance the critiques of “the miniaturists,” the “your story starts here people” and the cop-out guy who insists that “this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it.”
Which I would never, ever, stoop to saying except in this paragraph that I’m writing right now. Puzzlers that I will refrain from evaluating include “On Not Growing Up,” about a 71-year-old child, and “The Father Costume,” in which a character speaks “a language called Forecast” consisting of sounds “barked into a stippled leather box.” Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, and the meaning of the seven stories in the second and fifth sections was beyond me, though I did appreciate their inventive language.
Then, Marcus won me back with the final story, “The Moors,” 40 pages of the thoughts that run through the head of an oddball named Thomas as he approaches a co-worker at the beverage cart at work, and then hilariously bursts some kind of a mental gasket and utters a few sentences of baby talk at her. It works — trust me. Or don’t trust me. Maybe you will prefer the stories in section five.
Perhaps for Marcus’ next story, he should write about a convention for readers of Leaving the Sea, who huddle in groups according to which stories they favor, the section one people on one side, the section five people on the other. It’s a little far-fetched, but as Leaving the Sea proves, Marcus can handle it.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Dallas Morning News, 17 January 2014
The stories in Ben Marcus’ new collection are sometimes riveting and sometimes tedious — such as the title story that is six pages and one sentence long. The stories sometimes are realistic, sometimes dip a toe in the fantastic and sometimes venture so far into another world that the characters aren’t recognizably human.
Marcus established himself as an innovative fictioneer through three acclaimed books, including 2012’s The Flame Alphabet. As I read this collection, I’d enjoy a string of stories and then hit upon one that baffled me, such as “My Views on the Darkness,” written in the form of a Q&A, set during some ominous event known as “the hardship.”
A reader’s views on Leaving the Sea might shift story by story or even page by page. Marcus told Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, that when he looked back at his recent stories and planned this collection, “I realized how many other kinds of stories I wanted to write. I saw huge holes and limitations in what I’d done.”
If Marcus’ goal was to make each of these 15 stories completely different in style, length, tone and position on the realism spectrum, he’s accomplished his mission. But for a reader, it can be a bumpy ride. These stories are by turns entertaining, difficult, hilarious, puzzling, sweet and sad.
Those that gripped me most usually fell on the more realistic or funnier side of Marcus’ oeuvre. In “What Have You Done?” a former sad-sack named Paul flies home to Cleveland for a family reunion. He has a good job, a wife and a baby, but his parents don’t know this, and when he mentions them, they don’t believe him because he’s lied so often in the past. Bitter Paul notices that his family has erased all signs of him from his former room, which now looks like “a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking.” The genius of this story is that everyone reacts to Paul as if he once did something unspeakably horrible, but except for a few hints, we never learn what exactly this was. He’s seared in his extended family’s memory as a volatile screw-up.
In “The Dark Arts,” a young man suffering from an autoimmune disorder is in Germany undergoing experimental therapies that he can’t afford while staying in a creepy hostel and waiting for his girlfriend to show up as promised. In “Rollingwood,” a divorced father does his best to fend for his asthmatic son but can’t catch a break from his ex-wife, co-workers, boss or the world. “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” is the touching and loopy story of a grown son who watches PBS with his elderly mother and interweaves his tangled anxieties and thoughts about life with her amusing analysis of the shows. All of these stories are sad, mysterious and beautiful.
One of my favorites, the hilarious “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” is about a writer forced to teach a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. When he sees the ship’s welcome packet in his room, he thinks, “More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of [my] books or stories.” Marcus captures the agony of teaching such a class, as the teacher tries to draw students into participation, fend off the overfriendly ones and balance the critiques of “the miniaturists,” the “your story starts here people” and the cop-out guy who insists that “this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it.”
Which I would never, ever, stoop to saying except in this paragraph that I’m writing right now. Puzzlers that I will refrain from evaluating include “On Not Growing Up,” about a 71-year-old child, and “The Father Costume,” in which a character speaks “a language called Forecast” consisting of sounds “barked into a stippled leather box.” Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, and the meaning of the seven stories in the second and fifth sections was beyond me, though I did appreciate their inventive language.
Then, Marcus won me back with the final story, “The Moors,” 40 pages of the thoughts that run through the head of an oddball named Thomas as he approaches a co-worker at the beverage cart at work, and then hilariously bursts some kind of a mental gasket and utters a few sentences of baby talk at her. It works — trust me. Or don’t trust me. Maybe you will prefer the stories in section five.
Perhaps for Marcus’ next story, he should write about a convention for readers of Leaving the Sea, who huddle in groups according to which stories they favor, the section one people on one side, the section five people on the other. It’s a little far-fetched, but as Leaving the Sea proves, Marcus can handle it.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
June 16, 2014
Linked story collections are, I imagine, a challenge to write. This one's links seemed character psychology-based, and I found them mostly irritating. They (I quit reading about 2/3 of the way through) consist of men on an existential brink, many of whom are on their way to being unglued, a process the stories leave hanging on serial cliffs. I found the crises to be petulantly related, and only intermittently compelling. I have no problem reading a series of linked voices that are all male, but the women were all retro-shrewish in limited ways that I could not, like much of the prose, square with the rhapsodic praise for Marcus's virtuoso use of language on the cover--I still do expect some congruence to "content" of prose style, even in the breathiest of PR prose. I don't mind diving deep into the mind of a misogynist or a guy who has issues with women, if I sense there is real exploring going on, even in the asshattery; but I didn't. The throwaway bitter lines were not as good or as funny or as inventive as most late-night TV sketches.
Def one of those "I was at a different concert" books.
Def one of those "I was at a different concert" books.
November 10, 2014
I actually did not finish this book. I tried. I really did. I got through three stories before I quit. I struggled hard to identify with the characters, to be sympathetic to their plights. However, his characters are impossible to relate to and I found myself either not caring what happened to them, or wanting to see them fail because they are so thoroughly unlikable. I've read excellent stories about characters who are flawed--they do or say terrible things to themselves and others, but you still find yourself rooting for them. The characters on these stories, though (the ones I read, anyway), seem to have no redeeming qualities. It's impossible to trudge through a book if your main characters are boring or so one-dimensional that you couldn't care less whether or not they achieve what they're setting out to do. There is an air of pretension and entitlement that rubbed me the wrong way.
And as I've seen others comment, the overuse of the word "rape" to describe so many things. If you're a writer, surely you can come up with more ways to describe things than that??
And as I've seen others comment, the overuse of the word "rape" to describe so many things. If you're a writer, surely you can come up with more ways to describe things than that??
February 15, 2014
funny, absurd, moving, sad, terrifying, genuine, the emotional gamut that gets run here is far more compelling to me than all this lip service paid to the "experimental"-realist spectrum at work (though - to be fair - it is a uniquely varied collection in that it's broken down along the lines of Marcus's era-by-era authorial proclivities - still, did all the reviewers get together and unanimously decide to centralize this spectrum, Jesus). Anyway, it's real damn good. You'll like it. Especially if you're down with all the career phases but if not you can skip sections freely but this will make you kind of an asshole.
MVPs = The Moors, Leaving the Sea, I Can Say Many Nice Things, What Have You Done?, Watching Mysteries With my Mother, Loyalty Protocol, The Father Costume... etc etc etc
MVPs = The Moors, Leaving the Sea, I Can Say Many Nice Things, What Have You Done?, Watching Mysteries With my Mother, Loyalty Protocol, The Father Costume... etc etc etc
August 9, 2014
I found most of the stories deeply misogynistic -- focused on women as objects, one-dimensional characters who served the sexual interests of the (mostly, if not entirely) male narrators, even if nothing was acted upon. Further, several of the stories threw the word "rape" around as though it is not a reference to a specific, violating act.
In the few stories where this wasn't the case, the reader watches deeply lonely men try to navigate a world where they assume everyone is happier/better off than them, and therefore making fun of them. To me, this also rings true of the particular misogyny of "nice guys" who believe the world (or women) has done them wrong despite them being SO nice to everyone; the guys who eventually seek or imagine some sort of revenge to quell their self-loathing.
In the few stories where this wasn't the case, the reader watches deeply lonely men try to navigate a world where they assume everyone is happier/better off than them, and therefore making fun of them. To me, this also rings true of the particular misogyny of "nice guys" who believe the world (or women) has done them wrong despite them being SO nice to everyone; the guys who eventually seek or imagine some sort of revenge to quell their self-loathing.
January 29, 2014
The first section of this collection made me recall the Bolano quote that popular literature is popular because "it is easy to understand." The first three stories are pretty straight forward and linear.
After that you(the reader) get deeper into the weeds of Marcus's experimental writing.-Caveat emptor
After that you(the reader) get deeper into the weeds of Marcus's experimental writing.-Caveat emptor
February 20, 2014
The sheer chasm between styles and forms hurdled in this collection is in and of itself impressive, yet in each disparate piece the indelible style of Marcus is there, in language or in narrative structure, and that makes the feat even more striking. Marcus is a stunner with words.
Read
January 23, 2023in his workshop this semester so reading to … understand where he’s coming from as a writer reading and teaching. and this was delightfully good— I haven’t enjoyed a short story collection as much as this one in years. knotty and neurotic and thick with gnarled people and so good at concealing/dispensing information in an economic manner. really excited to hear his feedback and also want to read more by him now.
September 10, 2017
The best contemporary writer I've read since Lethem.
August 7, 2018
reread. It's still a banger front to back.
November 2, 2018
Хүн юуг ч даван туулах чадвартай, тэвчээртэй, юу ч хийх боломжтой юм байнөөө
August 1, 2016
Sad, Weird, and Weirder
"I don't think my mother will die today." You have to have some admiration for an author who begins a story with such a wonderful inversion of Camus' famous opening to The Stranger, even though he soon moves into a clotted dystopia of alienation that makes Camus seem almost cheerful. This particular story, though, "Watching Mysteries With My Mother," is almost normal: a meditation on death (and English mystery series on PBS) that only gradually replaces empathy with detachment. It comes more or less in the middle of a collection of fifteen stories that are thoughtfully arranged, from sad but straightforward at the beginning to weird and still weirder towards the end.
All four stories in Part 1 have male sad-sack protagonists, out of shape, no longer young, unhappily married or divorced. Not cheerful reading. But I liked the second, "I Can Say Many Nice Things," about an professor teaching a fiction-writing class on a cruise ship. Marcus' skewering of the students and the pedagogical balancing act required of the professor is so accurate that it made me laugh out loud; I should have treasured the moment, for it would not happen again. Part 2 contains a couple of stories in the form of interviews with sociologists doing work on childhood and hermit behavior respectively. The content is chilling, but the language is such a perfect parody of academic discourse in the social sciences that I have to quote it:
Yes, Marcus is good—for those that like him—but I can't say I derived much enjoyment myself. But I was pleased when the last story of all, "The Moors," about a man ("fat Thomas the sadness machine") lusting after a colleague in his office, returned to at least some semblance of the real world, linking neatly with the tales with which the collection opened.
And a pleasant note to end on: I love the paper-sculpture covers that the publisher gives his books!
"I don't think my mother will die today." You have to have some admiration for an author who begins a story with such a wonderful inversion of Camus' famous opening to The Stranger, even though he soon moves into a clotted dystopia of alienation that makes Camus seem almost cheerful. This particular story, though, "Watching Mysteries With My Mother," is almost normal: a meditation on death (and English mystery series on PBS) that only gradually replaces empathy with detachment. It comes more or less in the middle of a collection of fifteen stories that are thoughtfully arranged, from sad but straightforward at the beginning to weird and still weirder towards the end.
All four stories in Part 1 have male sad-sack protagonists, out of shape, no longer young, unhappily married or divorced. Not cheerful reading. But I liked the second, "I Can Say Many Nice Things," about an professor teaching a fiction-writing class on a cruise ship. Marcus' skewering of the students and the pedagogical balancing act required of the professor is so accurate that it made me laugh out loud; I should have treasured the moment, for it would not happen again. Part 2 contains a couple of stories in the form of interviews with sociologists doing work on childhood and hermit behavior respectively. The content is chilling, but the language is such a perfect parody of academic discourse in the social sciences that I have to quote it:
The term "adult" is problematic, I think, and it's too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganers, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking.Better buckle up, for similar diction will recur in many of the later stories. Much as in Ben Marcus' novel The Flame Alphabet, they move towards totalitarian or post-apocalyptic societies. In some, as in "The Loyalty Protocol," even normal interactions and family bonds are governed by community vigilantism whose standards the protagonist cannot fathom. In "The Father Costume," life on land has been replaced by rowing in small boats, and language has all but disappeared. In "First Love" and the other stories in Part 5, a primitive pseudo-science has taken over even the normal processes of feeling and expressing love. But "Leaving the Sea," the title story, is a tour-de-force: six pages of increasing madness in a single run-on period, breaking down with devastating effect at the very end into a stuttered gasp of staccato sentences.
Yes, Marcus is good—for those that like him—but I can't say I derived much enjoyment myself. But I was pleased when the last story of all, "The Moors," about a man ("fat Thomas the sadness machine") lusting after a colleague in his office, returned to at least some semblance of the real world, linking neatly with the tales with which the collection opened.
And a pleasant note to end on: I love the paper-sculpture covers that the publisher gives his books!
March 22, 2014
This is no ordinary writer and this is one hell of a book. But it is not flawless. First the trouble I had: the second half of this book turns quite experimental, from the more structured and deliberate nature of the first half. Some stories I would punch and shove my way through, others I would put up my hand and surrender, simply being unable to mentally wade through it. But for this portion of the book, more experimental, I felt the longer stories worked better - he could go on and on exploring the psychology of a character (almost always a man) and still have space to forward some kind of narrative. In the shorter ones, there was no visible direction and as a reader, direction has always been key (which is why I struggle with poetry?). But the stories that work, and there are plenty of them, are emotionally moving, and they would both tear and repair me. Almost always the character would be a man, as I mentioned, and he would have a broken psyche, full of self doubt and questioning, unable to function in a social context - while this wasn't a problem for me, the consistency of this type of character and his neuroses, it could be for some. This is probably the best book of short stories since "This is how you lose her" which came out a while back, and he reminds me of a writer I loved in my earliest days of reading as an adult: David foster Wallace. Absolute gold when you find something that works in his stories, but you sort of have to endure waves of stuff that is hit or miss. This for me is better than going through a mediocre or even better-than-average piece of work, you get occasional bits of genius.
February 20, 2016
This book could have easily been called "How to Be Terrible to Your Family: Stories." Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; I just wish there had been more variety. But that's the thing I realized by reading this book: Ben Marcus seems to only ever write about horrible people tormenting their loved ones. Or more often, good people being tormented by horrible family members. I guess everyone has their niche, but after a while it just got tiring.
Marcus seems to really only experiment with language in the same ways, as well, which again, got old after a bit. Until this book, I had only ever read Notable American Women, which was so good and so original and so weird that it blew my goddamn mind and it immediately became one of my favorite books. But after reading Leaving the Sea, and seeing that for Marcus, his use of language is his only trick, it lessoned the impact that Notable American Women had on me. There are only so many stories you can read where, for instance, "mouths" are renamed something different and are given a different purpose.
And all of that would be well and good if Marcus would actually have a plot that could be carried without experimental language--which he does, every so often, and I'm thankful for it. I bought the book for the experimental stories, but ended up being most fond of the ones that weren't. His experimental stories had very little plot outside of the weird use of language.
All in all, I did enjoy the book. I really did. It just got old after a while. My recommendation to anyone interested in Ben Marcus or this book is to just skip it and read Notable American Women.
Marcus seems to really only experiment with language in the same ways, as well, which again, got old after a bit. Until this book, I had only ever read Notable American Women, which was so good and so original and so weird that it blew my goddamn mind and it immediately became one of my favorite books. But after reading Leaving the Sea, and seeing that for Marcus, his use of language is his only trick, it lessoned the impact that Notable American Women had on me. There are only so many stories you can read where, for instance, "mouths" are renamed something different and are given a different purpose.
And all of that would be well and good if Marcus would actually have a plot that could be carried without experimental language--which he does, every so often, and I'm thankful for it. I bought the book for the experimental stories, but ended up being most fond of the ones that weren't. His experimental stories had very little plot outside of the weird use of language.
All in all, I did enjoy the book. I really did. It just got old after a while. My recommendation to anyone interested in Ben Marcus or this book is to just skip it and read Notable American Women.
March 18, 2014
Over the years, I've become bored with a lot of contemporary fiction, but Ben Marcus has always been an exception. He creates work that's mainstream accessible, but isn't altogether easy to get through. The Flame Alphabet took me longer than normal to read, but not because I didn't like it or because it was difficult - Marcus's writing just demands a slower-paced kind of attention, somehow, and when you reach the end, you feel it was worth it.
Leaving the Sea is, stylistically, a diverse collection (which is another thing one doesn't often see in contemporary story collections), beginning with very straightforward narratives and venturing into more experimental fiction. It's a transition that works, because while you may feel you're frequently reading about the same narrator (middle-aged, down-and-out, male hot mess type), the style and writing changes in each section so you don't feel so disenchanted with the work as a whole.
Certain stories also show Marcus's strength in carrying out his bizarre ideas, that he doesn't just take stylistic chances merely for the sake of experimentation. The title story, just one sentence long over several pages, is breathtaking, both in its narrative arc and execution. The Moors puts an almost post-apocalyptic, epic lens on a man's arduous trek from his cubicle to the office coffee cart. Personally, I enjoy these risk-taking efforts more than the traditional stories that open the book, but this is overall a strong collection from Marcus.
Leaving the Sea is, stylistically, a diverse collection (which is another thing one doesn't often see in contemporary story collections), beginning with very straightforward narratives and venturing into more experimental fiction. It's a transition that works, because while you may feel you're frequently reading about the same narrator (middle-aged, down-and-out, male hot mess type), the style and writing changes in each section so you don't feel so disenchanted with the work as a whole.
Certain stories also show Marcus's strength in carrying out his bizarre ideas, that he doesn't just take stylistic chances merely for the sake of experimentation. The title story, just one sentence long over several pages, is breathtaking, both in its narrative arc and execution. The Moors puts an almost post-apocalyptic, epic lens on a man's arduous trek from his cubicle to the office coffee cart. Personally, I enjoy these risk-taking efforts more than the traditional stories that open the book, but this is overall a strong collection from Marcus.
February 15, 2014
Ben Marcus is a mad engineer, throwing coal on the fire of a locomotive crashing into the future. His best work in this collection lies perpendicular to our reality, comfortably adjacent to it, but decidedly not of it. There is a depth of psychological insight (vis a vis loneliness, alienation, insignificance, marginalization) here, that I haven't seen in previous work by him (Notable American Women), most clearly demonstrated in stories about sad-sack protagonists being rendered nearly meaningless in near-future dystopias. These stories, reminiscent of George Saunders's work, are near enough to our own world to resonate truly, but "off" enough to provoke a meaningful dissonance that is inventive, revealing and daring. Other, more surreal stories, are aggravating the way Donald Barthelme's stories are aggravating: They resist easy interpretation and their very metaphors and conceits seem to suffer and bleed like leprous sores on the skin of the story, yet they remain invigorating, bracing and novel. In the most mundane or the most surreal of these stories alike, language becomes a tangible sorcery, humans are a primitive beast and the narrative voice is an amplification of the will to survive despite a world that seeks to render, to trivialize, to make obsolete. When Marcus is at his best, language is a weapon of will that his narrators are sometimes reluctant to wield because they only intuit its power and do not understand, or are too willing to deny, its true nature.
March 12, 2014
I was on a plane to Seattle reading this collection when a fellow passenger turned to me and said, "Is that Ben Marcus?" I confirmed it and he replied, "I've never seen anyone reading Marcus on an airplane." If that's true, too bad. Marcus, or some of his stories at least, make for wonderful airplane reading - enthralling, swift narratives that explore the more curmugeonly side of our (mostly male) interiors. He can render the unlikable but sympathetic better than anyone. This is what writers mean when they discuss the unreliable, unlikable but wholly sympathetic character in fiction.
I, however, lean towards the less experimental side of Marcus's stories, which occupies the first half of this collection. Those stories, all of the stories in Section 1 and 2, and a few others here and there. After that the more experimental efforts leave me less enthralled with less of an emotional response.
I, however, lean towards the less experimental side of Marcus's stories, which occupies the first half of this collection. Those stories, all of the stories in Section 1 and 2, and a few others here and there. After that the more experimental efforts leave me less enthralled with less of an emotional response.
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