Aiming to transfix
‘TAKE A nice, wellmeaning character and hack at his core philosophy with an axe until he doesn’t know what to think any more, then see what happens.’ This is how Ben Marcus summed up what happens in his new novel, A Flame Alphabet, about how a community in New York State cope with their lethal children.
Marcus doesn’t come across as someone happy hacking away with an axe at anyone. He is a cheery, super smart man in his mid-40s, with two small children he adores. Though, he adds worryingly, he does wonder about “the power that children can have in certain kinds of families and what children do with so much power.”
Marcus was born in Chicago in 1967, the son of two academics. Religion was a complicated issue in his home. His father grew up in Brooklyn and “went to Hebrew school every day” and his mother was “a lapsed Irish Catholic”. They attended synagogue on the high holy-days but also celebrated Christmas. And yet he ended up interested in Jewish philosophers and writers: Gershom Scholem, the great writer on Kabbalah and mysticism, Isaac Babel and, above all, Kafka.
What about Jewish-American writers? “Roth and Bellow were important to me, and Malamud, but I was not that smitten by their narrative style and their Jewish experience was so different from mine.”
The reference to “narrative style” is important. Marcus himself has a very distinctive style, one that has made him one of the most talked about writers in America. I asked him whether he con- siders himself a writer of “experimental fiction”. Suddenly, I can feel the axe sharpening. The term, he says, “means little and it’s essentially derisive”.
Marcus wrote a famous essay for Harper’s Magazine back in 2005, a passionate defence of writing that tries “to engrave the elusive aspects of life’s entanglements… to produce the sort of stories that transfix and mesmerise.”
It is a powerful attack on writers who “insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality” — in particular, Jonathan Franzen, then at the height of his fame with his bestseller, The Corrections. Franzen had had a dig at “difficult” fiction and Marcus led the counter-charge. But it wasn’t personal. He knew Franzen but the debate, he says, was “a spirited disagreement about ideas”. What kind of ideas? Readability, difficulty and literary language.
This will come as no surprise to The Flame Alphabet’s readers. It has received great acclaim in the US. The writing is superb, the story a scary dystopia, mixingsciencefiction,Jewishmysticismand Marcus’s own distinctive, dark vision.
“I take great pleasure from the grim side of life. I find it very appealing,” he says. As for the central character, Sam: “I didn’t allow him to find much comfort in anything.” But why not? “That’s not what the novel would be good at.” Ben Marcus speaks as he writes, easy-going, accessible but every now and then making you feel you’ve ended up in an episode of Dr Who written by Kafka. ‘The Flame Alphabet’ is published by Granta at £16.99