2.5
Leaving the Sea
ByPublisher Description
By turns hilarious and heartfelt, dark and illuminative, Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea is a ground breaking collection of stories from one of the single most vital, extraordinary, and unique writers of his generation.
In the heartfelt “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
In the heartfelt “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLeaving the Sea Reviews
2.5
“What a strange collection of stories. The first few pieces were largely realist and there was a fair bit of comedy surrounding dysfunctional families, and awkward (and invariably overweight) protagonists who muddle along in the business of life.
We would meet versions of this protagonist in the increasingly strange stories. Less it be said that these pieces are without a discernible theme or concern, abstract as they are, they tend to be about familial and romantic relationships, their complications, and the gamut of feelings they invoke, all captured compellingly enough in Marcus’ unconventional prose.
The most striking (and readable) of these for me would be “Rollingwood”, where a single father is suddenly saddled with sole care responsibilities for his child and the sf-esque “The Loyalty Protocol”, about the night evacuation drills a community conducts which turn sinister.
But at right about that point, which is like two-thirds in, the collection begins to go south for me, as if Marcus knew his readers would need some warming up before he unleashes his arguably more experimental work on them.
“The Father Costume” (which opens the fourth section of this collection) begins like this: “My father’s costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at the man’s body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions.”
So many questions. Then the narrator helpfully tells us in the next paragraph: “I could not read fabric. I had a language problem.” Right. Some paragraphs later, the narrator tells us about his house, if it is really that, because by then, the reader would have lost grip of any reference point to a plausible reality: “A house where birds performed a required orbit that affected how a man aged. A house where the flight of a bird might keep your costume young. Our windows fashioned of lens material for the sun to photograph us.”
The rest of the stories that follow are just as baffling and I was sorely tempted to give this book two-stars and rename this collection as “Lost at Sea”. But the final story in a section by itself, “The Moors”, saves this collection from absolute oblivion somewhat. The overweight and awkward narrator resurfaces and the reader feels simultaneously tickled by, sorry for, and repulsed by him as he stalks his attractive female colleague down the hall to the beverage cart. Not a complex story but it is so laden with the narrator’s fears, desires, self-loathing and paranoia, it engages the reader and it is undeniable that Marcus manages to reel the reader in with these conflicting emotions for his protagonist, and when the reader is quite trapped like a bird in hand, Marcus turns the story on its head with a startlingly poignant ending.
I am not going to write off this writer just yet, but I am not in a hurry to challenge myself with more of his work right away.”
“something tells me there’s more here in this collection for men than there is for women. lot of these stories felt like he bit off more than he could chew. I enjoyed the writing style at times but often just held this book like ??????? what is even going on here ok bye”
“Pretty great language, but throughout the book, the stories become increasingly absurd and tedious.”
About Ben Marcus
Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Flame Alphabet, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife and children.
Other books by Ben Marcus
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