"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.)

"Leaving the sea" by Ben Marcus (Granta, 2014)

Stories from Granta, Harper's, New Yorker, Tin House, etc.

In "What have you done?" a 40 year old son returns to the parental room for a re-union, playing the role he's played for years (sad, fat loner) even though he's married with a young child. When he tries to tell his close family the news they thing he's lying. In "I can say many nice things" Fleming, a university writing tutor, is running a course on a cruise ship -

• "now it was Fleming's duty to string critical latticework between them, ricocheting between praise and criticism until everyone had gotten their money's worth"
• "Slowly the workshop roles emerged. There were the miniaturists who wanted to look at a certain line on page 5 and wonder if maybe it shouldn't be airlifted earlier ... There was the person who said that the story really began halfway down page 2. Apparently these people were everywhere, even on boats. ... there was [Carl] who confessed that this story really wasn't his thing so it wasn't even fair for him to try to evaluate it ... Whatever Carl's real thing was would be a closely guarded secret until he turned in his own story, and everyone - or so it usually went - once they saw it, would strain to detect the slightest difference between Carl's writing and the work of his peers he'd spent so much effort distancing himself from"

The other two stories in section 1 have less interesting plots and fewer highlights. Forget section 2. I liked "Watching Mysteries with My Mother" - a son speculates on when his mother will die, while thinking about TV shows. "The Loyalty Protocol" feel too long. A son of old parents is caught up in social situations that he struggles with but whose rules we don't understand - Kafka updated to the PC age. "The Father Costume" reminds me of "A martian writes a postcard home" and high SF. Here are some extracts -

• "My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother's hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On those evenings when the sky was stretched too tight and he birds struck amongst it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door" (p.179)
• "My father woke early and opened four jars in the doorway. He tuned the radio dial to Englishville and we heard a series of recent horizon songs made with a slow, old-fashioned breathing style. In between the music, one of the more famous years was being described by a girl whose voice had to project through a wooden mouth" (p.181)

"First Love" isn't so different -

• "it is imperative to keep your person clean and keep his tank and limbs filled with the appropriate fluid, seasonally correct and rich in emotion, to be sure his shoes are hard on top and solid for the long haul, to mind that your own person is posture perfect and can aim his body true, accounting for the possible refractions of light that occur between the people to today, also known as new wolves.
  The shovels we use to cleave the air in two - and possibly reveal a person we might fail against - were once abbreviated as hands. This was when we had two shovels each" (p.199)
• "There are men blessed by water, whom women cannot see. This is the only favor water can grant, to cloak our mistakes by adding a layer of reflection to our skin, which helps other people take more responsibility for us, once they see how horrible they can look when we reflect them" (p.202)

The pieces in section 5 also have a poetic style - e.g.

• "Sometimes instead of blankets he would throw another person into the room ahead of him, which was referred to as "turning on the light." These people were said to have a blinding effect, particularly if they arrived unannounced and appeared to be strangers. Loud people have thin, hollow bones" (p.210)
• "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 pocket-sized emissary name "Joe" introduced us. I did not love myself." (p.218)
• "The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Walking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other's bodies as though we only had water inside us that could be easily poured away. We used a wringing technique called a hug" (p.219)

"The Moors", in a section by itself, didn't appeal to me.

Other reviews

• Stuart Kelly (Ben Marcus is one of the most stunningly original and profoundly unsettling writers of his generation. ... Two stories stand out: the title story, "Leaving The Sea", most of which is one self-justifying and self-cancelling sentence; and the final piece, "The Moors")
• Randy Boyagoda (a relentlessly sardonic and cynical read that is ambitiously experimental in style ... Several of them feature middle-aged men stuck in failure, whether in their relationships with parents, partners and young children, or in their working lives. Efforts to break free only worsen these dismal situations. ... Leaving the Sea would be a very good work of conventional literary fiction if it simply offered such smart and tart observations. Yet Marcus has little interest in conventions, except to undermine them ... the middle section of the collection showcases Marcus’s skill and interest in playing with language and storytelling structures. Alas, the skill is greater than the interest it generates ... the collection’s closing story, “The Moors”, is more than worth the uneven reading experience that precedes it.)
• Jim Krusoe (Marcus presents a deeper range of identification for the reader, more emotional complexity, but still plenty of the chair-gripping alienation that marked his previous books. ... What are the unspoken rules of Marcus’s world? For starters I would offer the following: 1) Things are always pretty bad; 2) Women are always superior to men; 3) Fathers never cease to be scary; 4) Practically the only food anyone eats is potatoes, possibly because while they’re nourishing, potatoes aren’t much fun; 5) One’s choice is either to flee and hope to find shelter, or to stay put and just hope.)
• Alexandria Symonds (He is marvelous on the level of the sentence and in his depiction of flawed human logic. ... Mr. Marcus is at his best when this poetic instinct for language converges with his steady and sharp sense of plotting.)
• Jeff Turrentine (To read “Leaving the Sea” beyond “The Loyalty Protocol” is to penetrate the thin membrane that separates Marcus’s inventive — if still fundamentally conventional — storytelling from his declared commitment to literary experimentalism. ... With the exception of the excellent final story, “The Moors” — which echoes George Saunders’s office-space tragicomedies — the second half of “Leaving The Sea” comes across largely as fiction for the Age of Theory: narratives constructed in anticipation of their own academic deconstruction.)

"The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus (Granta, 2012)

A couple, Claire and Sam, are having health trouble just as their daughter, Esther, is going through adolescence. She's cutting herself off from them and becoming verbally aggressive. As first they think her presence is causing their illness. Then they discover that there's a pandemic.

• Claire had an explanation. The old, the tired, the ruined, got done in by bites. Turned into leaking sacks of mush. Whereas the young, they swigged venom to the lees and it supercharged their bodies. They could not be stopped (p.15)
• people were noticing that among the ill numbered no children (p.16)
• That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected (p.31)

They worship in a private hut

• Claire and I held synagogue inside a small hut in the woods that received radio transmissions through underground cabling ... The practice derived from Schachter-Shalomi's notion of basements linked between homes, passageways connecting entire neighborhoods ... Huts could be anywhere, disguised in the woods, hidden in plain sight (p.41-2)
• The secrecy surrounding the huts was justified. The true Jewish teaching is not for wide consumption, is not for groups, is not to be polluted by even a single gesture of communication. Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, put it into language (p.44)
• We endured speculation on what we might be doing in the woods ... A radio console with a flesh underside is postulated. Modules sheathed in gauze, lubricants siphoned from children, injected to flow through custom gears (p.46)

The transmissions are erratic, vague. LeBov and Thompson have theories and suggestions about the pandemic. Children are collected up, bussed away. Someone called Murphy befriends Sam, uses his hut, announces LeBov's death having previously pretended to be LeBov, and says that he pretended to be the broadcaster Thompson too. Language is the toxin.

• We've trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used (p.64)
• The master dissector Gabriele Falloppio, forerunner of the modern autopsy, found what he termed curious erosions in the brain from multilingual patients. Or more notably Boerhaave, who registered speech aversions in the infirm and began to use small doses of speech as homeopathic treatments ... Epidemics like cholera reimagined as speech-driven, miasmatic cyclones, an airborne disturbance, to be sure, but one that fed on the denser pockets of speech, grew stronger in such places, dying out in regions of controlled silence (p.82)
• In Wisconsin all language, no matter the source, was toxic. The children alone were immune (p.118)

Religious people and poets are amongst those who've distrusted of language and/or group activity in the past. Both themes are explored here

• The flame alphabet was the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold. ... We could not say God's true name, nor could we, if we were devoted, speak of God at all ... Since the entire alphabet comprises God's name, Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God (p.65)
• From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language ... Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech (p.83)
• Without Claire the hut felt small and false, the childish architecture of some hack inventor, someone who didn't believe enough that this location would actually be inhabited by real people one day. Claire and I were proud - I'm speaking for her because she couldn't hide how she felt - that we had something private like this that was our own, and that it gave us something to listen to, to think about, to rail against, to love. But there were times when I wondered why it had to be so difficult, so dependent on questionable equipment (p.79)
• In my haste I believe I left the listener there on the floor of the hut ... exposed for anyone to find, to try to use, because I'd broken code and gone alone to the hut. Because I thought I could do something like this by myself (p.80)
• The great effort of eager amateurs was everywhere. There were none of us who were not amateurs now. The experts had been demoted. The experts were wrong. The experts had perished. Or perhaps the experts had simply been misnamed all along. (p.146)
• self-disguising paper ... that allowed you to see only the script character you were presently reading, and nothing else, not even the word it belonged to. It broke the act of reading into its littlest parts, keeping understanding at bay ... I could write with the perfect impassive remove that would keep me detached from the very thing I was writing. I'd have full deniability (p.166)

Jews later come in for some stick -

• an inflatable letter vacuumed of air ... my idea of what had been missing from the Hebrew alphabet (p.210
• That's mirroring ... Saw it on one of those film strips about insects. If he's susceptible, you gain his trust and he thinks he's found an ally for life. ... Works pretty well on Jews, who usually think they're unique (p.220)

Sam's evacuated, loses his wife, goes to LeBov's HQ where he concocts samples of old scripts, languages and codes that are tried out on guinea pigs. He finds his wife amongst the willing guinea pigs. He escapes. 3 years later he's caring for his daughter. The tables have turned. She's no longer a child, and is suffering like adults do. Sam has discovered from LeBov a way to combat his language allergy, but it involves making children suffer - or even die.

Apparently Marcus was an experimental author. SF work can be under-appreciated by general readers, so this is an interesting move, as if Borges wrote "The da Vinci code", or Whorf and Sapir wrote "The Name of the Rose" (with the style of Alien abduction accounts thrown in). One can see why Borges isn't famous for writing novels. This should have been shorter - a novella or even a short story. Certainly phrases like "Most were deep brown in color" (p.202) could be shortened.

The central conceit - that language is toxic - is pursued remorselessly. Given that context, are the characters sufficiently resourceful? Does the story work on its own terms? It's an age of cars, land-line phones and radio. No web, no computing languages, little about semiotics (though I could have missed many allusions to theory - I noticed only a few Beckettisms). Should it be read as Allegory? Are attempts and failures of understanding alluding to Religion or LitCrit? It's all from Sam's PoV. Given that there are few other characters, and even they are often absent or ill, that's quite a burden on the narrative.

I should have been amongst the target audience for this, but it didn't really work for me, either as a page-turner or as intellectual stimulation. I was interested to see what further ideas he could come up with once he'd established the premise. At times it seemed as if that was his main interest too.

Other reviews

• Nicholas Lezard (Guardian) (Marcus has, then, taken the avant garde preoccupations of his earlier work and deftly transferred them obliquely to the form of the dystopic sci-fi novel.)
• J. Robert Lennon (New York Times) (Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent, but “The Flame Alphabet” doesn’t fulfill its own promise as a hybrid of the traditional and experimental.)
• Christian Williams (The Flame Alphabet is working from its own similarly skewed glossary, and it’s set in a world that feels alien one moment and alarmingly familiar the next. That's why the flat characters and static relationships are more a necessity than a weakness: They serve as constant guideposts in shifting terrain. Also forgivable: the book’s occasional lapses into repetition ... Flame Alphabet is a brutal, wonderful book, streaked with the sickly brown and gray hues of Philip K. Dick and David Cronenberg)
• Toby Litt (New Statesman) (In attempting to write more, Marcus has come quite a long way towards conventional plots and characters – with both gains and losses. ...It’s hard not to read Marcus’s normalisation as a factor of his own fatherhood, of his having crossed the blame line. No other position is so guilty, in Marcus’s cosmology. In this, the novel could not be more explicit: “Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.”)
• Jeff Alford (The seventy-or-so pages that make up the bulk of the novel's outbreak are nearly flawless in their execution. Marcus's words are exquisitely written and painful to read, and perfectly compliment his premise of a verbal, spoken disease. Here, answers are not necessary; by accepting the premise on the book's first page, readers are instantly along for Marcus's vengeful ride. The Flame Alphabet turns slightly sour when its ideas develop and its themes are addressed head-on. The novel becomes something different; instead of beautiful and painful snapshot, it becomes an unnecessary quest for answers and meaning.)
• NPR (as Sam is stripped of language and flails as he struggles to protect his family, he discovers a stubborn, silent humanity that persists — perhaps predates — language and doesn't depend upon communication)