Leaving the Sea is a collection of short stories of extraordinary technical agility and control from a writer who is preoccupied with how the language of fiction both discloses and conceals its subjects. In his 2004 introduction to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Ben Marcus suggested that good fiction "is busy keeping secrets, protecting its plots". Accordingly, he went on, "the story, then, is what the story is hiding". This spreading and complex theme has dominated Marcus's writing and it is richly on display in a collection that showcases work from all stages of his writing career, from 2000 to the present day.
Marcus's first novel, Notable American Women (2002), and his short collection of interwoven fictional texts, The Age of Wire and String (1995), are works of formidable experimental difficulty. Their subject matter, together with that of the recent novel, The Flame Alphabet (2012), may at first be thought to be dystopian, realised as it is in horrifying, if darkly humorous, narratives of extreme and miserable human situations. But the word dystopian does not do justice to Marcus's constant efforts to question the relationship between fictional language and the world. As he writes in the essay mentioned above: "The words real or realistic are curious, because stories are not real whatsoever."
It may come as a surprise to readers who know Marcus's previous books, but not the stories he has published in magazines that make up Leaving the Sea that, on the evidence of at least three of these stories, he is a master of conventional, realist fiction (however much he may resist this generalising category of writing). In What Have You Done?, a man returns to his parents' house for a family reunion and finds himself unable to tell his family about significant developments in his life; in The Dark Arts, a man travels from the United States to Germany to undergo experimental medical treatment and is abandoned by his girlfriend; and, in Rollingwood, a father finds himself horribly alone and thwarted in his attempts to care for his baby son. The language in all these stories is acute and exacting; details of observation are haunting and revelatory, as when Paul in What Have You Done? meticulously registers the ways in which his parents have sanitised the features of his boyhood bedroom and reflects on how they reflect their dissatisfaction with him.
The strange and disconcerting language that Marcus used in his previous books continually sought to redefine and redescribe fundamental human actions and environments. The results were hallucinatory, sometimes funny, utterly original and memorable, but the reader may have felt that the result was a language game designed to guard its secrets too closely. (The narrator's comment in Notable American Women that "understanding is overrated" serves as a droll reflection on much of Marcus's writing.) In these three stories, however, the more conventional formal treatment of its themes is "busy keeping secrets" only to render their eventual half-disclosure so powerful and poignant.
For readers new to Marcus, these stories will be a rewarding point of entry to the more challenging and characteristic tales or short fictional texts in this collection. As with Marcus’s previous work, these more difficult texts force readers to question their understanding of how humans relate to one another and of how familiar human actions and situations may be described and interpreted in language. Many of these stories do not have conventional plots; they consist rather of ardent and elaborate attempts to question the major themes and subjects of which plots consist, as in this moment from Against Attachment:
“In what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, the shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?”
These questions seem to me to be central to Marcus’s work in their courageous willingness to examine how language not only encloses and protects us from our deepest fears about ourselves but how – as is markedly the case here – it exposes us terribly to our understanding and recognition of them. Marcus’s haunting phrase “understanding is overrated” is, then, as much a smiling acknowledgement of the dangers of self-knowledge as it is a comment on the difficulties that his exceptionally intelligent writing presents to the reader.
Matthew Peters is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.