![]() ![]() But for of all its dystopian inventions, the novel is fully intelligible and, for the first time, fully human. Marcus’s new novel, The Flame Alphabet, in which the words of children become lethal to adults, shares many of the tropes that helped brand him as a “difficult” writer-language as poison, absurdist family violence, a Cronenbergian fusion of the mechanical and the grotesque. ![]() Prepare, as the postmodernists might put it, to interrogate your assumptions. ![]() Or maybe you put them down for something easier, in which case you know him only as that guy who tore Jonathan Franzen a new one in a 2005 essay in Harper’s: “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It: A Correction.” “It’s not politic to suggest that the brain is even involved in reading,” he lamented then, defending dense fiction against crowd-pleasers like Franzen, for whom “language is meant to flow predigested, like liquid down a feeding tube.” You’d be forgiven for coming away with the idea that Marcus equated difficult writing with ambition-and readability with selling out. Perhaps you’ve read his disjointed first novel, Notable American Women, about a behavioral-therapy cult in an alternate-universe Ohio, or even his truly abstruse collection of “stories,” The Age of Wire and String. ![]() You probably think of the author Ben Marcus-if you think of him at all-as a deliberately obscure novelist who likes to fling Molotov cocktails at the literary Establishment. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |