Having immersed myself in Ben
Marcus’s fiction for awhile, it dawned on me: every fiction writer creates
their own world, ready made. Marcus’s new story collection Leaving the Sea is wide ranging, if variable and perhaps uneven because
of the terrain it covers, from the experimental, to the more traditional
narrative with a gloss of dystopia—which for being distilled and strained
through the Marcus language machine, are still somehow, experimental. Marcus is
bold for being an experimental writer with the full endorsement and backing of
the mainstream publishing venues. However, here, the variety suggests that some
of the approaches aren’t overwhelmingly successful. The most successful stories
rely on trusty narrative hooks (“The Loyalty Protocol”), and a sense of scene
building, ultimately driven by an ensemble of characters at odds to the
protagonist. Often these stories rely on a kind of extreme antagonism between family
members, frequently between a father and son. In this way, Marcus mines
familial territory with the anomic detachment and numbness of Kafka, and the
barely contained rage of a Beckett figure forced into society under duress.
Marcus has roughly three periods: early (enigmatic),
middle (slightly less enigmatic) and late (more familiar, if still shrouded in
occasional cryptic trappings), corresponding roughly to his three previous
books. This collection is almost evenly spread over these three periods. Marcus,
besides making this jump from his earlier, often cryptic narrative making, into
a more straightforward, perhaps accessible story telling in recent stories,
establishes himself as firmly rooted in the modernist tradition. This is to see
such a position as a duty to literary history—and the study of it—and perhaps a
responsibility, a la David Foster Wallace.
Attention can lag in a few of these
stories, in particular “Watching Mysteries with My Mother”. This story might
suffer the diagnosis Marcus made himself in “On the Lyric Essay”, a 2003 piece
in The Believer, when he talks about
“[…] the implied tedium of fiction not driven by story, particularly if a
reader is expecting one. ” Is it then still a story? What set this story
up for this was the frequent refrains, which felt like code words for “now the
author is going to reintroduce the repetitive phrase,” while it didn’t feel as
if the story was progressing. The story’s agenda did not meet the reader’s
prerogative.
Where he doesn’t use this language
toward estrangement, as he does in the early stories, he provides alienating scenarios,
particularly as a means of buttressing the dystopia. Where successful, I sensed
something new for Marcus was blossoming on the page, as in “The Loyalty Protocol”. The beauty, and fascination for me, of Marcus’s writing, tends to come
with seeing his meticulousness with the possibilities in the language. Or, as I
said of Notable American Women (here,
in a review of The Flame Alphabet),
Marcus has a knack for “remarkable description [which] leads the reader to
recognition and surprise from which irony elicits hilarity.” One of the
earliest published of the stories in Leaving
the Sea, “First Love”, feels as if it might have come as a revelation
between The Age of Wire and String
and Notable American Women. In this
story, there’s a sense that the use of language as applied to a physical
activity described in the story, is fresh, as if being discovered by the
author. Marcus has so often reapplied this approach, however, that in the later
stories the effect can feel stale and overworked. That’s why the newest
stories, though traditional in narrative form—even, perhaps, conventional—though
a departure from his signature style, are a welcome and interesting development.
These are stories not of the usual world, but one a few degrees off kilter in
an alternative existence.
