"Notes from the fog" by Ben Marcus (Granta, 2018)

Stories from New Yorker, Granta, etc.

• Cold Little Bird - The 10 year-old son of Martin and Rachel suddenly refuses his parents' love though he remains friendly with his young brother etc. He knows his rights. Martin and Rachel disagree about how to respond. The story doesn't go much beyond describing the scenario.
• Precious Precious - Ida works in AI on a project that tries to extract and clarify people's thoughts. "Sometimes Ida would forget, and she would appear at the office on Sundays, her face strangely delicate on her head, a visitor to her body. She would stare through the glass at the vast lobby of Thompson. The doors to work were locked on the weekends, of course, and after standing there a while, the intruder alert, which certainly went by a blander name, shot a jolt of current into Ida's legs, sweetening them with pain.". She visits her mother and father who are in different care-homes. She's prescribed a common pill which people sometimes regurgitate after days. I like the ending - "Those shiny things in the grass, the glittering crystals in the parking lot, the glinting everywhere she looked. Like the tiny white skulls of birds. Tablets strewn everywhere, glowing at her feet.".
• Blueprints for St Louis - A couple design memorials. There's some theory about such designs. They win a bid for one in St. Louis, While the male is in St Louis he seems to have an affair. The couple split. Not one of the best stories.
• The Boys - A women with a husband and 2 young girls flies to her brother-in-law plus 2 young sons when her sister suddenly dies. While tidying up and helping with the boys, she considers the etiquette of masturbating in anothers' house. The unattractive brother-in-law offers her $200 for a hand-job. It becomes a habit. Then she realises that quick, emotionless sex with him would kill two birds with one stone. He suggests that she takes the boys away and brings them up - he'd pay for their upkeep and Skype each evening. She agrees.
• The Grow-Light Blues - Carl had "joined Mayflower's wearables team five years back and had been whiteboarding applications that tracked emotions, or tried to, so that the world's feelings could finally get accurately logged. And mined. And then probably ransomed back." He becomes a test subject for a product that uses different light frequencies instead of food (after all UV produces vitamen D). It fails.
• George and Elizabeth - Here's the start - "When George's father died, he neglected to tell his therapist". Later he does, but forgets at first to say that the woman he slept with when collecting his father's possessions was his father's mistress. His sister (famous, rich and uncaring) says "Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I've come to rely on the arc. It's part of my process"
• A Suicide of Trees - The title refers to trees that kill themselves to give their offspring a better chance. The narrator's father has disappeared the same time as the lodger has. "There is an age for a young man when he realizes his father will no longer excel or succeed at anything". Mathematicians meet at the house. They send him "out for something they called 'crisps' - a word they seemed to use for anything that could be eaten ... More than once I saw a man brutally felled by the crisp backhand of a woman who could solve the problem faster" - why the repetition of 'crisp' in the same paragraph? A detective visits several times. Perhaps my favourite piece so far.
• Critique - A review of a simulation of a hospital which, daringly, uses real materials, though some other aspects are blurry. "It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a weakness of the project, no matter how profoundly ambitious it is to create a world, build things in it, and then allow life to bloom. It is a clear weakness to create an erratic, confusing experience out of time, to give each creature an apparently unique perception of time, and then to make time itself inconsistent"
• Lotion - A child with a mysterious illness is treated with a lotion. He recovers, gives predictions (which prove to be inexact) of people's deaths, then dies. The doctor refines the lotion, tries it on himself and others. After his death his daughter continues the development. Lotions become commonplace - to learn languages, release secrets, etc. They're applied "On people, things, and space".
• Omen - Fowler stays put despite the storm. He wanders, wondered if there are cats in the abandoned houses. He breaks into the house of a girl he encountered at a party. When he's back home a trooper encourages him to leave. He doesn't.
• Stay Down and Take It - Another storm. A couple in a rather tense relationship head for an evaculation shelter. Not liking the lack of privacy they try to find a hotel then decide to sleep in the car, more content than before.
• The Trees of Sawtooth Park - Another clinical trial subject - a mother. The company she works for is trying to discover the chemicals that cause each emotion, with the aim of blending them. They plan to have sensors in many places - dissolved in water preferably. A snow storm's predicted. She tries to pick her kids up from school. They're not there. When she returns home there are detectives, asking how she is. She goes into a clinic, loses years.
• Notes from the Fog - A teacher is sacked because of "What people feel when they see [him] and hear [him]". His wife dies. At one point he drove her to the woods and left her there, because she wanted things that way. But he turned back and drove her home. She gave up the drugs because she didn't like "going into a terrible fog". After, his kids stay with their aunt until can he find a job. Then he collects them.

Several parents die. The characters' lives are de-emotionalised, over-self-analysed. Things that should connect don't. And v.v.. Sex connects to unlikely things. There's a dissociation of inner and outer. Relationship have a therapist/patient tone.

They have trouble distinguishing between the real and the simulated, between reality and reality show, though the answer doesn't matter much to them. Some of the characters are lab-test subjects. Some live as if life was a double-blind trial, as if expressions of love might be placebos. Some live as if life was a psychology test where the subject's told a lie about the purpose of the test.

Other reviews

• Chris Power (Marcus tends to set his stories an uncertain number of years in the future, ... In stylistic terms he has come a long way from the disturbing, almost alien syntax of his earlier books, The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women, and his characters now feel less like malfunctioning allegories and more like flesh and bone. His narrators are often despairing, but their despair is edged with a bemused sense of the absurd. Those who work in tech or pharma, or some godawful combination of both, are complicit in their own debasement, and their narratives are equal parts critique and confession.)
• Katie da Cunha Lewin (From the opening story, Marcus explores the problems of living among other people — scary, unpredictable, strange people — while trying to understand the rules of the game.)
• Jeff Giles (He’s an engrossing, poetically surreal writer. He’s often woundingly funny. Still, the pages turn more heavily here than they did in his last two books)
• Houman Barekat (Clustered together, however, the more scientifically themed stories become repetitious and lose some of their edge ... Of greater interest are a number of stories foregrounding personal relationships blighted by distance and disconnection, with protagonists adjusting to the absences left by bereavements, disappearances or plain old loss of interest. ... The social world appears in Notes from the Fog as a self-correcting ecosystem that is ultimately robust. It is bleak as hell, but people muddle through; life, after a fashion, goes on.)