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3,5As with most story collections: some stories are superb, some are just ok
Ben Marcus has improved. His earlier fictions were appallingly uninvolving. The stories here range from quite uninvolving to quite involving, though his continued insistence on throwing language at us hoping for "Ooohs" and "Aaahs" spotlights a writer still artistically immature.Sometimes it's enough to be amused by strong imagery and some striking dialogue, even though it doesn't add up to much. The two science-fiction stories about testing new drugs achieve that level of success. But Marcus's
I enjoyed this story. The use of language is beautiful and the narrative itself is engaging enough. But what I loved was the layers of character that were unwrapped in the narrator during the story. To me, it all started with this sentence: "I guess I want James to die. I don’t want this actively. Or with malice. But in a dim and distant way I gently root for James’s absence so that I can proceed to the other side of the years I have left, get to what happens next."From there, my attention was c...
...he grabbed Lester, and Lester squealed with delight, squirming in his father's arms. Do you see how this used to work? Martin wanted to say to Jonah. This was you once, this was us. Cold Little Bird is about a young man who decides that he hates his father. At 10 years old, Jonah is suddenly too mature for his parents' bed time stories, their hugs, their kisses, their tickles. It was so jarring to see. The father, Martin, was at his wit's end when he saw how independent his eldest son was get...
Still gloriously, unflinchingly weird. Marcus can craft a sentence that just leaves my jaw hanging open, and then make the next one just as wild and strange, and the next after that. A little more linear than his previous collection, there are still a gathering of moments here where it feels like he's not writing about our world, but maybe the next one over. Terrific collection.
Free to read at The New Yorker (you get four free reads a month; this is worth burning one)An older married couple called James and Alice, together for many years, are retired to a coastal island that is in Hurricane Boris (much raillery over such a moniker is had)'s sights. Inertia being what it is, they wait until evacuation is mandatory to get out of there. The story is the trip, narrated from Her P.o.V. He is ill. She is a conflicted mass of irritation, habitual affection, and solidly bu...
I was dubious about this when I saw that Marcus had been name checked by Alexandra Kleeman the author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine which I had just finished and hated.This collection of stories was rather bland, I don't remember any of them in detail and they were all samey in style and characters so they all merge when I try and recall them.
Months ago I must have read this in such a blur of euphoria that I neglected to catalog and extol it here. I don't always buy brand new books at full cover price as soon as I possibly can, but when I do there's a good chance it's Ben Marcus. I half-hope he does something terrible eventually so that I can gain some critical distance. Until then his oeuvre remains suspiciously perfect and true.
Some stories are amazing. Others less so.The opening story was the most chilling for me. Imagine being a parent (shudder!) and having your child tell you that he does not love you, and even more, that if you attempt to hug him again he will report you to child protective services for inappropriate touches. Yikes! (Reminiscent of The Fifth Child, which it explicitly references, but even more chilling.)
I notice that the writing Ben Marcus is likely to get either 1-2 stars or 4-5. I can understand that and I like the fact that he is not comfortably in the middle. This story is not comfortable at all. What do we do when we love someone intensely and they stop loving us back? This story poses the question and it's a good one, a tough one. The parents of a suddenly mature and opaque 10 year old can't just shrug this off as a phase or shed their concern as not central to their very beings. Can the
Perhaps it’s wrong to give a book this uneven 5 stars, but hear me out: sure, some of these stories aren’t great. One of them I couldn’t even finish, and two of them felt a bit glib and facile. But at least half of them are sublime. Truly exceptional in the literal sense, as I don’t think anyone is even trying to do what Marcus is doing, and perhaps shouldn’t. His stories are bizarre, deeply unsettling and on the sentence level, even on the word level, virtuosic. While novels ought to give us an...
