A reading from The Flame Alphabet

13 March, 2010
6pm

Marfa Book Company
105 South Highland
Marfa, Texas 79843
432-729-3906

At work today, Thomas the Dead, as he had privately named himself, made a grave miscalculation by using baby talk with a colleague. He had not previously stooped, even with his own child, to baby talk.  Why give the boy another reason to look at him in that cold, queer way of his?  Nor had Thomas indulged the sweet-toned animal coos that his colleagues babbled at each other when they banked and crashed around the lab on their foolish errands.  Thomas preferred last words, the sort of speech to be discharged on one’s deathbed.  He guessed that some unpleasant number of decades ago as a teenager, when he wore a full beard and sported a tie with his short-sleeved dress shirts, he must have sounded old and tired and bitterly impatient, a youth who had already drawn firm conclusions on the key issues of the day, back when certainty was a young man’s best chance at securing a mate and avoiding a life of hellish solitude, not that this had worked so neatly for him.  Thomas was one for whom speech, the bursting, songlike kind that showed the world what an imbecile you were, was an annoyance that also happened to sour his body like a toxin.

Thomas and the colleague had been refilling their coffees at the same time because he had failed to calibrate his advance on the self-service beverage cart.  Thomas’ mistake, like nearly all of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution.  Death by conversation, and all that.  Avoidable, avoidable, avoidable.  After all, he had seen the colleague approaching, a tumorous, hand-painted mug dangling from her finger.  Thus the peril of a bald, unpoliced encounter with her could not have been more glaringly clear, and the blame was squarely in his corner.  Possibly it was the way the colleague glided shamelessly past Thomas’ desk.  What is it called, he wondered, when you provoke feelings of inferiority and general shittiness in others simply by the way you walk?  When your mode of personal locomotion, in all of its devil-may-care mastery, serves as a scold to everyone fat and leaky and ingloriously failed, sitting in their chairs, tired, swollen, and angry?

The warnings didn’t matter.  The colleague gusted past his desk, flaunting how unmistakably alive she was.  He could smell her superiority and sheer you’ll-never-have-me-ness, the bottled freshness that had shrouded her in a twister of perfume.  Can one copulate against such a column of wind, he wondered?  Are there handholds?  And Thomas, triggered by scent and irritated lust, swallowing a powerful urge to dry heave, sprang after her as if she was riding on a vehicle he suddenly needed to board, despite knowing (or not knowing vividly enough) that he’d only have to wait behind her at the coffee cart and worry the air with his oversized body.

Anyway, Thomas couldn’t fathom how a person who hoped to live through the day could subscribe to such a Lego-ridden fantasy of worker relations the word colleague implied: as if a group of people whose heads were darkened by the very same hovering ass—something he decidedly never learned in night school was the term for how the human voice sounded when the mouth was smothered by an oily slab of buttock—would ever link arms, sing songs, and be massively productive together, just because they peed against the same wall or starched themselves into a stupor on the salted Breadkins from the vending machine every day.  Colleague was a dressed-up word for the coworkers who would feast on his chest if they ever found him unconscious in the bathroom, yet she was his colleague, or coworker, or peer, or well, enemy, just the same, and Thomas couldn’t help thinking of England.  Really he pictured an old, sodden map of England which, even as it molted in his undisciplined imagination, he knew could not be prodded for even the most glancing accuracy (who policed, he wondered, just how badly people imagined things to themselves?).  It wasn’t so very far away, this England, with its bearded men who fought to the death over Plato, who politely disrobed and entered the sexual transaction without a break in their conversational patter, as if it would be the highest rudeness to gasp or cede rhetorical ground at the moment of penetration, even with a half-ready British piece of genitalia that reeked of potatoes.

The colleague walked gaily down the hallway, while Thomas, drafting in her tunnel of outsized merriment, took up the somber rear.  The two of them in procession—like a dashing mom with her slob kid in tow, thought Thomas (a kid who was very noticeably older than his mother)—past the outlying desks and mail bins and various lab doors that were fitted with, instead of door knobs, the long chrome lever arms that one normally saw on walk-in freezers.  Thomas may as well have called after her: Mommy, wait, and he felt a sudden urge to gurgle, fall to the floor, and rub himself for comfort.  Chalk that up to another entirely appropriate response he would never indulge.  If only he had a dead body, or was it money, for all of these, uh, unpursued urges.

They were not exactly friends, Thomas and the colleague, but the two of them coffined up in the same stinking, diesel elevator enough times, trespassing each other’s borders with wartime regularity and altogether too little overt treachery, that didn’t it, he thought, merit some kind of default marriage in the end?  Was there a better working definition of marriage than a weapon-free battle between exhausted and defeated adults, with an agreement to gaze just above each other’s heads, icing each other out with indifference?  Cold War would be the way Ramsey, in equipment, would dismiss it to Thomas, Ramsey who delivered transmissions on married and fathered life whenever Thomas had to sign out gear—a beaker, a tray, and an allergen percolating tool the office referred to as the Bird’s Face—and who frequently just reported the sickeningly early hour he was wrenched awake to monitor his paper-eating, tantrum-spurting kid, a youngster who by 8:30 in the morning was at least four hours deep into his terrible day, exhausted and battle-scarred and as strung out as a torture victim, which, come to think of it, was a pretty adequate description of Ramsey himself.  In fact, whenever Thomas tried to picture Ramsey’s boy, he just pictured another Ramsey, and saw two old, redfaced Ramseys chasing each other around an oatmeal-splattered room.  Big Ramsey and Big Ramsey, trying to kill each other.  A classic story of father and son.

Thomas guessed that at times, maybe in the elevator, the colleague could smell how little he had slept, while in retaliation he could see the sauce stain on her back, or the rumpled tidings of underwear crested over her waist line.  That was a fair piece of intimacy, in the end.  Shouldn’t they, by now, have already trucked past the romantic swells and decadent fits of sharing indulged by the other middle-aged marrieds, toward a brisker season of restraint and theatrical indifference regarding each other’s mild but steady pain?  If they knew each other at all, that is.

For Thomas there was only one outlet for a journey down this hallway—the coffee cart—since he lacked clearance to any of these rooms or freezers or whatever they were.  On bright-lettered signs the doors might have cautioned: Carcass Inside.  Turn Back! But turning back would draw too much notice, and he doubted he could rear up and reverse course without some kind of verbal narrative support of his decision—I’m turning back now because I’m scared!—and the thought of such a strange and conspicuous outburst, even one more finely stated, made him feel vaguely sick.  What kind of idiot does things, then says why?

So off he trotted after her, drugged with regret and adrenaline and the sort of fear that felt like a boring old friend.  He had no mug of his own.  He’d have to work that out later.  And there was an issue with his, uh, pants.  Ahem.  But for now he was up and at-large and he did his best to gather his face and body into an expression of deep purpose, even if there was none he could rightly claim.

The colleague was a long woman, medically attractive, perhaps intensely attractive.  But when Thomas, as was his habit, called up in his mind the nude and indeed the coital prospect with her, simply to work out the mental visualization side of things, in place of vaginal goods, Thomas could only conjure a charcoal sketch of the area, just a shabby pencil drawing of something he was supposed to want to bury his face in and weep with relief into.  This bothered Thomas because although he could not draw, he could imagine all sorts of drawings, an encyclopedic catalog of, uh, especially rich imagery, which turned out to be an entirely useless ability.

It wasn’t the specific armature of nudity that he longed for anyway (the canals and curves and rough red patches bursting with boiling hair), but something dutiful in him—as if his erotic strategy was being assessed by specialists—bowed to an elementary form of sexual speculation, and he customarily launched this material on his inner slide show for their sake.  Perhaps these specialists would see that Thomas could hew to the national erotic standard.  But, if anything, he was fair-minded about his crotch pictures, courteously rendering them from the hips of nearly everyone he passed.  The result was a kind of gallery, the mug shots, he called them, and it calmed him to realize that his central-most imaginative act, the vision work he was called to most consistently and which occupied him more than any other creative task, was to flesh out in his mind the sexual organs of everyone he saw and to catalog this data for later use.  Mostly the genitage that colored his gallery was rendered from some distillation of a person’s face, that is if the face had been squeezed like a sponge or crushed underfoot.  The aesthetics here—what Thomas thought of as his functioning design paradigm, because he had read in one of June’s All About People! folios that we create our private images out of a deep sense of order, logic, beauty, and inevitability whether we like it or not—involved the notion that a dog (or spouse or child or anything we care for and, in particular, feed) comes to look like its provider.  Or something from the stronger, more powerful face is sprayed over the weaker face, rendering it nearly identical.  There was a funny-sounding scientific rule to be invoked here, whatever it was called.  An old biological trick, which makes us think, Thomas guessed, that we are really caring for and feeding ourselves.  One’s crotch-stuff should in some way invoke the face, tell a story about it, Thomas felt, or, rather, one’s face should in its lines and swollen crags map the sexual terroir.  Someone more poetically afflicted could charge up better metaphors about that one.  Or maybe it all just meant that his imagination was severely limited, deriving all of its ideas from the face.  He guessed that artists would laugh at how obviously sourced his material was.  Or maybe they’d just be bored.

Once they arrived for their coffees, Thomas would have to try to drum up some chit chat with the colleague that would not, when it was analyzed for content and style and delivery, by just whoever gave a shit, get him committed to a home, or tossed in a closet that someone somewhere must keep warm for the miserable and lonely and disturbed.  That’s what these people did, wasn’t it?  They spoke in cold chunks of wordage and no one ever wept or seized or died.  The nearly sexual urge Thomas had to destroy himself through difficult encounters, encounters just like these with women who surpassed him in every measurable way, would provide the sweet subject matter for days of mistake analysis, which Thomas found was as rich a pastime as there was.  Now I know what I’m doing this weekend, he thought.  It was as though he’d been programmed to do exactly the wrong thing, and not for the first time he pictured a keypad on his back that anyone could access, a sweaty keypad that he couldn’t very well clean without one of those curved brushes.  This would be another part of his body that itched and hurt and broke and sometimes bled.  Just add it to the list.  Fat Men with Itchy Backs, would be the support group he would join.  Let’s go program Thomas, all the kids might say, and he would quietly lift his shirt so they could have their fun, tucking himself forward so his belly bulged over his legs.  Whose idea was it, this body of his?  Do we need yet more reasons to feel disgusting?  Or if not a keypad, maybe just a kind of embossed symbolage belted over the high rear ribcage—if you can find my ribs, he thought—raised up in scarred topologies like a cattle brand, so pedestrians and god knows who else could effortlessly dispatch him into crisis and shame and encounters of exhaustion simply by coding him, even as he spent nights at home trying to fashion a utensil that would allow him to take control of the area, or just to shield it from poking strangers.

Protection was what Thomas wanted, from people, their words, their bodies, and the storms they kicked up when they came anywhere near him.  Couldn’t the office supply a salt-water receptacle for him to hide away and brine in when there was no actual work on his desk?  A casket—upright, translucent, so the others could see him suspended in saline—to keep him from harm?

It wouldn’t matter.  He’d sniff out the surplus misery anyway, and grind his face in it until the itch stopped, but pretty fat chance of that.

It had been a day of no apparent weather, with grey cars hushing by like silent tracers, and air so swaddled and wet it seemed filled with foam.  Last week at work a streak of birds had been sent forth to pop and burst against the office window.  Thomas figured it to be some pageantry tossed off by the city to stuff the sky with some color, but the official word from the listserv was that a new time-keeping system was being tested.  He hadn’t bothered to calibrate his watch to it, even as, hourly, birds smeared through the air—fired from one of those pipes, or under their own power, Thomas wasn’t sure—struck the office window, and dropped from sight after the impact.  A neat poof, a bright burst of dust, and the bald white clock on the wall clicked off another hour.

No one in the office, as far as he could tell, had even blinked, as if, oh, this kind of slaughter was just a matter of course.  And if Thomas never actually saw a pile of birds rotting in the courtyard, such a pile was inferred, wasn’t it, which was quite enough of a worry to nurse until the office lights were browned down at sunset and the employees were released into the streets, so they could stagger home, hump their wooden comfort dolls, and moan into their blankets all night.  Or whatever Thomas imagined them doing when they weren’t construing allergic thresholds, putting the beaker to a theory, or just tearing into lumpen sandwiches with a single, angry finger.

That was all history now, sucked into some brownish whatever.  There was no one else on their feet now but Thomas and the colleague.  Thomas looked back into the cluster and saw sweaty necks and heads, fat red arms.  It was error sampling time, at least in his unit, and it was nervous, spastic work.  So much lab work resembled one’s early attempts at masturbation.  There were angry little bursts of typing, and the group of employees seemed to wheeze as a single beast with one faulty lung.  He was careful to silence himself while he walked after the colleague, to guard his breath and keep his pants legs from shooshing.  But just because no one was looking at him didn’t mean his pursuit was going, uh, unnoticed.  Thomas kept his head steady, but stole his eyes toward the greasy camera, a lens jammed badly into some mottled sheetrock, behind which Solly in the security room would be fastidiously ignoring them.  Thomas guessed that Solly’s pants would be shucked and he’d be wrapping a slice of soft white bread around his penis while the security monitors revealed in blue light all the morons who walked and slept and stood and self-groomed around Crawford Labs.

This was the easy part.  A straightaway down the lab’s pale hallway that would allow him to get himself together.  Big goddamn ha, ha to that.  He pulled down his shirt as he walked.  He got his thumbs between his belt and pants, deep into his bready sides, but this did little.  You can’t very well hang onto yourself! The wise old maxim of someone important who was now rotting in a hole, a phrase lost to needlepoint and coffee mugs.  He licked a finger on each hand and worked some dried out spit over his eyebrows.  Such pointless grooming.  If only he could shed a limb, or just reach inside his face and reshape it so he looked, maybe, just a small bit less Thomas-y.  Let’s do a little work on that face, how about? As it was, his face looked as though someone had tried to reshape it, and failed.

The colleague in her cloud of superiority had done her prep in private, no doubt.  She was born prepped, Thomas thought, and he pictured her in adult form being birthed in a clean bright room somewhere to a team of scientists, who wiped her off, hosed her down, and fitted her in specialized gear so she could go out and make other people feel bad.  She actually, probably, looked forward to such workplace soujorns like this, so she could flaunt her shit here and there and take everyone down a notch.

But was there a lower notch, Thomas wondered?  Let’s invent a new notch, underground, and let’s get you all nice and cozy there. He’d find out pretty soon, at the beverage cart, where the basic transaction of drink retrieval, the animal quest for hot, black fluid that Thomas rigorously pursued alone so as not to ever, and that would mean never, have to enter a discussion, would be precisely too long to undertake without some kind of conversational exchange.

The problem was that the beverage cart was lodged all alone in an arena-sized space referred to by the laboratory staff—by pretty much anyone who worked and drank and ate and felt pain at Crawford Labs—as the Moors.  The Moors was so misconceived architecturally that none of the so-called founders of Crawford could do anything except stash the coffee cart in it, stain it with some Germanic decorations that seemed spritzed from a hose—a hose with different, ethnic tips—and hope not to die.  Somewhere there were architects rubbing their hands together, laughing at the idiots who were daily demoralized in the spaces they designed.  Demoralized, crushed, belittled, and then, just for fun, de-sexed in the most complete possible way.  Genitals flicked off neatly at the base.  Holes smoothed over with one of those Photoshop tools.  Bottoms filled in with putty.

The Moors may just as well have had a genital removal station you visited on your way out, water fountain height, retractable into the wall.  Tilt in your hips and come back clean.  And the egghead architects laughing and pointing, maybe even rubbing themselves into states of ecstasy.  Their brains probably sat outside of their heads, simmering in jars of cola.  It was a pornographic pleasure, no doubt, to watch people killed in buildings, killed slowly, brought just near death and held in suspension simply by pre-calculated dimensions, by room design.  Someone had already thought of this, he knew, the killing power of buildings, so, who cares, another great idea he could not claim as his own.  Buildings were coffins, of course, but that came later.  First they were killing machines.  Did it matter to anyone how mixed that metaphor was, and where had he read that, anyway?  It was probably one of those folios that had been ribboned together as a wedding present for him and June, someone’s younger brother’s dissertation.  Best wishes, here’s my fat brother’s piece of obscure scholarship.  We love you guys! He didn’t remember ticking that off on the registry at the fucking Shoe Hole, or wherever he and Juney had listed the material bill of goods that would transform their ordinary marriage into a super-powered alliance, or whatever.

No doubt there were cool loaves of data on a server somewhere devoted to the subject of architectural annihilation, and the theory was clearly infallible, Thomas thought, lumbering after the colleague, who was bouncing out of sight at the end of the hallway.  Yet anyone who likened a building to a coffin, anyone who went public with what every known human in the world already totally accepted to be true, was officially considered an asshole.

Of course the Moors must have been built to enable the kind of productivity that architects fantasize about while at work in their hoteliers—whatever those studios were called—where their young assistants, wearing t-shirts and no pants, rendered drawings, bound by contract, by the apprentice’s promise, to relieve all impediments to their masters’ creativity.  The Moors was probably meant to be a place where people will be thinking and performing at their best, why not, a blueprint premised on the belief that the actual people who would seize this space for their displays of high performance creativity would not be defeated, exhausted, unattractive, and sad.  Excepting our friend the colleague, of course.  Immune to space.  Sadproofed.  The Moors was designed for people who just couldn’t be bothered to die on time.  Architects don’t make buildings for people who are a bloody mess, just soup, really, because then there’d be no buildings, just tureens.  Had there been a dissertation on that?  Whose fat brother wanted to take that one on, wondered Thomas?  Tenure fucking awaits.  Vats would be trucked in from the factories and the people would be poured in.  Architects have somehow gotten away with thinking that people are not already technically dead, dead beyond repair, according to the accepted measurements, while really they are sloshing inside their clothing, walking spills.  It is their first mistake, Thomas thought: believing they are not building coffins.  Why weren’t architects simply called coffin makers?

The complete story is available in Tin House #42.

Vintage Books, 2002

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.

PRAISE

“Ben Marcus has been accused of redesigning the ordinary sentence, of emptying words of their meaning and injecting them with new, of treating grave matters (such as family and humankind in general) with farcical disrespect, and of blowing away traditional narrative structures with a diabolical wind. And all this may be true. But for those who would describe this work as fantastic, surreal, or anti-real, I can only say that this is Ohio exactly as I remember it. Jane Dark was my fourth grade teacher.” —Robert Coover

“Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O’Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges—and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.” —Padgett Powell

“Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women is a radical performance in American fiction. It is too literary for the novel as it is now practiced and consumed, and too perverse for other plausible designations. In order to pioneer the Marcus life-project the writer provides a ferocious handbook which, followed to the letter, launches a permanent revolution of nothingness. A family of unprecedented personae—the Marcuses, aided on the distaff side by Jane Dark, her listeners and Silentists—are brought forth to insure the evolution of “a new category.” The writer “fathers” an extensive formal vocabulary to advance the Behavior Bible’s annihilating goals, including uncomely devices and strategies like the fainting tank, the thought rag, the shushing posture, along with an array of essential life-project products such as the Ben Marcus Locater Bell, Chew Stand, Apology Center, Thompson Waterô, etc. It is killingly funny, and creepily sad. This book represents an unmediated thrusting toward love with an arsenal of intellectual alienation, and just as forcefully, a thrusting toward alienation with an arsenal of brotherly love–depending upon where you are poised to withstand the cataclysm. It is a profound and profane description of our basest drive: fear. Notable American Women is the work of a retiring albeit twisted virtuoso. Not for the pusillanimous reader.” —C. D. Wright

“Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.” —Myla Goldberg

“Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.” —Gilbert Sorrentino

“Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative.” —Maureen Howard

“Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world—that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike—would be Ben Marcus’s ideal reader, yet even without the poet’s dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew.” —Richard Howard

“Ben Marcus’s novel is funny and touching and full of movement and sound, all of which is even more remarkable since the book itself is about stillnesses and The Silentists and Behavior Water and things you put in your mouth to keep you from speaking. Marcus investigates—with equal passion—the intricacies of a new mythology alongside the intimacies of a broken family. This is the kind of strange and beautiful book you just want to have around, to dip into again and again.” —Aimee Bender

“I don’t use the word lightly, in fact, I don’t use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified—he makes the word new and thus the world.” —George Saunders

“Marcus (The Age of Wire and String) has crafted a dystopian novel in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984, with an overlay of 21st-century irony and faux naïveté. Writing in off-kilter documentary-style prose laden with acronyms and neologisms, he often wanders into ponderous whimsicality, but stretches of the novel are inspired riffs on contemporary totems and anxieties. Ambitious and polished, if sometimes willfully opaque, this is an intriguing debut.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“[Ben Marcus] constructs his narratives as an astronomer would a space telescope, so as to better observe and laugh at the earthly conventions of realism. . . . Imagine The World According to Garp as rewritten by Edward Gorey. . . . Marcus’s prose can spiral up and away into sublime nonsense.” —Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Ben Marcus’s first novel Notable American Women is a beautifully strange and compelling family allegory—Midwest mum and dad raise their son to shun all emotions—rendered in language that seems imported from a universe of deepest feeling, of intellect, of poetry, and, in the end, of majestic heart.”—Elle

“Marcus negotiates an esoteric though uniquely American literary terrain…. Marcus reinvents the family drama….The book evokes an alternate reality revealing the dark side of our common history, an…America that exists [only] in Marcus’s lyrical, abstract prose. This will be a difficult read for many, but it will surely stand the test of time as a genuinely important book.” Library Journal

“[A] stunning, strange and beautiful novel.” Esquire

“[A] darkly funny caricature of modern life.” Time Out New York

Behold a stunning world, made mostly of water, where clothing changes people’s behavior and time itself can be worn and discarded like cloth. Witness a father who takes his two boys out to sea, in flight from some menace at home, thus launching their adventures in a strange and dangerous territory. Artist Matthew Ritchie’s striking images blend scientific diagramming with vivid, colorful renderings of the apocalypse, while writer Ben Marcus’s cold prose plumbs the inner workings of two boys caught out at sea with a father whose costumes grow increasingly menacing. In this collaborative work, Ritchie’s and Marcus’s shared obsessions of mythology, physics, and ancient texts have produced a conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them.

Thomas Bernhard, the ranting, death-obsessed Austrian novelist and playwright who died in 1989, was the ultimate Nestbeschmutzer, soiling his country with screeds against the landscape, the people, and their history. Not content with the limitations of his own mortality, Bernhard darkened his will with the dictum that his works could not be published or performed in Austria after his death, as if to suggest that his homeland was not even worthy to bathe in his hatred. Although Bernhard’s executors have sashayed around his stipulation, his wrath has since matured into something far more universally toxic. In the end, Bernhard’s concerns are not a single country and its political crimes but rather the sheer affront of life itself, what the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran referred to as “The Trouble with Being Born.”

Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, fellow countrymen of Bernhard’s, reported on this trouble also, but in prose that was far more stately, tempered, and quite less given to spleen. Bernhard was altogether unconcerned with immunizing a reader against his surgical attacks on humanity, and if he made a blood sport of novel writing, he did it with a zeal and a gallows humor that is unrivaled in contemporary literature. His formally radical novels, which sometimes blasted into shape as a single, unbroken paragraph, were manic reports on such fixations as the futility of existence; the dark appeal, and inevitable logic, of suicide; the monstrosity of human beings; and the abject pain of merely being alive. Bernhard’s language strained the limits of rhetorical negativity: if his prose were any more anguished, it would simply transmit as moaning and wailing. Building interest in the grief experienced by people who look at the world and find it unbearable was a dark art of Bernhard’s, and his characters do not resist the long walk to death’s door but run to it and claw at the surface, begging for entry. After all, says Strauch, the agonized painter in Bernhard’s first novel, Frost, “there is an obligation towards the depth of one’s own inner abyss,” even if meeting that obligation destroys you.

A debut work of nearly unbearable bleakness, by a writer who would go on to produce some of the most severely nihilistic literature of the twentieth century, Frost, which was first published in German in 1963, is not so much a novel as a persuasive case against happiness, written in the relentless prose style that would become Bernhard’s signature. An Austrian medical student accepts a perverse task from a teacher: go to Weng, where “the roadsides favor promiscuity” and “children fall into sudden fits of weakness,” and clinically observe Strauch, the teacher’s estranged brother. “Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it,” says the teacher. This is a perverse thing to want, particularly from someone who has not seen his brother in years, and it creeps toward suggesting that such cold, loveless interest from a family member has something to do with Strauch’s miserable loneliness. It will turn out that other forces are bearing down on Strauch as well, and that misery happens to be one of his guilty pleasures. This is a man who excels at futility and unhappiness, and the performance of his grief will overpower every other spectacle in the novel.

The narrator arrives in Weng and is soon promised that he’ll “get to meet a whole series of monsters,” which proves to be true:

I really was frightened by this landscape, in particular this one spot, which is populated by small, fully grown people whom one can certainly call cretins. No taller than five foot on average, begotten in drunkenness, they pass in and out through cracks in the walls and corridors. They seem typical of this valley.

Readers of Bernhard will recognize this distortion as his default, fantastical take on the real world; the people who populate it are crushed into grotesque shapes, colliding with a brutal landscape that seems carved out of a cruel fairy tale. The language is gothic and clinical at once, affecting the airs of anthropological rationality. When Bernhard imagines beyond reality, it is to color the world worse, and he can be very convincing about it: “Cities that are long since dead, mountains too, long dead, livestock, poultry, even water and the creatures that used to live in the water. Reflections of our death-masks. A death-mask ball.” About his dank, mountainous environment, Strauch warns the narrator, “It’s not possible to be so healthy that being here won’t cripple you inside and out.”

Crippled inside and out certainly is a good working diagnosis of Strauch, although geography, mutilating or not, seems hardly to blame, however convenient a scapegoat. He is menaced by headaches, certain that frost is eroding his mind—a destroyed man whose hyper-articulate death throes seem to spout, without cease, not from the landscape but from his amygdala, the nut-shaped cluster of worry in the brain that might as well be called the anxiety fountain. Indeed, the treachery of landscapes in Bernhard’s work cannot compete with the poison and peril emanating from within his characters.

The narrator registers at the local inn where Strauch is living and passes himself off as a student of law rather than medicine. As subterfuge goes, the deception proves mostly irrelevant to the novel, but Bernhard clearly requires some established literary devices to keep the book from reading like a hatchet job on life itself. Yet the only character who could possibly care about the narrator’s secret identity is Strauch, and he’s too busy combing his own hair shirt to detect the lie. Strauch would much rather “make the world die in me, and myself die in the world, and everything cease as though it had never been.” That’s a pretty ambitious goal, and by the end of the book a kind of success has been achieved, as if the book has fallen on its own sword. The world depicted by Strauch becomes fairly cold to the touch, and the narrator, not to mention the reader, is sucked headlong and flailing into his death-ship perspective.

Bernhard is an architect of consciousness more than a narrative storyteller. His project is not to reference the known world, stuffing it with fully rounded characters who commence to discover their conflicts with one another, but to erect complex states of mind—usually self-loathing, obsessive ones—and then set about destroying them. Bernhard’s characters are thorough accomplices in their own destruction, and they are bestowed with a language that is dementedly repetitive and besotted with the appurtenances of logical thinking. The devious rationality of Bernhard’s language strives for a severe authority, and it tends to make his characters seem believable, no matter how unhinged their claims. Phrases don’t get repeated so much as needled until they yield graver meanings, with incremental changes introduced as though a deranged scientist were adding and removing substances in the performance of an experiment. “‘You wake up, and you feel molested,’” Strauch says:

In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast! When you go out on the street, you are subject to the gravest possible molestations. You are unable to shield yourself. You lay about yourself, but it’s no use. The blows you dole out are returned a hundredfold. What are streets, anyway? Wendings of molestation, up and down. Squares? Bundled together molestations.

Without a story to drive it, Frost builds not through unfolding events but by telemarking around Strauch’s bitter cosmology while the narrator follows him through the woods, fattening himself on the rage of his new mentor. A chart of Strauch’s worldview would produce a splotchy Rorschach of points and counterpoints, contradictions, reversals, and the occasional backflip, none of which could really hold up to a logician’s scrutiny, which is obviously the point. Strauch, a failed artist who only painted in total darkness, is opposed to nearly everything, and lest you think he’s a humanist at the core, with a fondness for the arts (that classic virtue of the misanthrope), he claims that “artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet.” Yet there are even worse evildoers, in his estimation: “I’ve never hated anything as much as I hated teachers.” A notable assessment, given that he was for a long time employed as one.  Of his students, he says: “I never told them the name of one single flower or tree. Nor gave them one country of origin . . . Because I am opposed to the enlightenment of children where plants are concerned, in fact, where nature is concerned.” Indeed, he believes that schools should be abolished and that young people should be required to visit slaughterhouses instead, which can teach them far more, and far more quickly: “The only wisdom is abattoir wisdom!” He swears he does not exaggerate, and that “imagination is an illness.” On his own powers of observation: “I discovered that my surroundings didn’t want to be explained by me.” Which doesn’t keep him from trying.

Strauch is too deranged to make sense, or, more worryingly, he’s too perceptive and intelligent to straitjacket his explosive declarations with coherence and consistency. Never mind the beautiful paradox of Beckett’s motto: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Bernhard’s version of the phrase removes Beckett’s compulsion to live: I can’t go on, I’ll kill myself. I am a coward for not having already killed myself. But since all pursuits are futile, suicide is futile. Better never to have been born.

One of the unbalancing pleasures of Frost is how frequently we can change our mind about Strauch as he himself obsessively changes his own mind, shifting our diagnosis from Angry Genius to Brain-Addled Sad Sack to Poet of Uncomfortable Truths. Not knowing the limits of his hatred and fear makes Strauch fascinating, and Bernhard, even this early in his career, knew how to use characters as shock treatments for the reader, dialing up the intensity before boredom can set in. The most chilling idea that recurs in Frost involves suicide, which is offered up by Strauch as the one authentic solution to the problem of being alive. But it is spoken of as such an inevitability—the question is only really when it will happen for each person—that it’s considered “the decision of the father (first and foremost) and of the mother (as well) to sponsor the suicide of their offspring, the child, the sudden premonition of ‘having created a new suicide.’” Suicide is a project initiated by all parents, and giving birth is likened to plotting a death. It feels violent, and violating, to have suicide threatened in one’s presence, even from a character in a novel, and to ignore it is like walking away from a drowning person. If there’s something voyeuristic to this role we’re forced into, it also imposes an unwanted responsibility, which is quite different from the routine empathy one might feel toward a more typical fictional character. This difference of literary effect begins to describe how assaultive Bernhard’s work can be. Strauch foreshadows the kind of character Bernhard would go on to create in novels like Woodcutters, The Loser, Correction, and Extinction—a ranting malcontent on a filibuster, staging grand disquisitions on the awful discomfort of being human, frequently endorsing suicide as not only appropriate but desirable. He so loathes the fact that he was born that he wants to erase himself.

Alive with rage and shouting in our faces, a character of this sort eats up so much of the stage that story and plot are crowded out to the perimeter, obediently clamoring for attention now and again, but appearing dim and perfunctory at best. The compelling happenings of Frost are mostly interior, and the physical world and its objects are rotely attended to. The narrator, innocent of the world at the outset, is so poisoned by Strauch’s perspective that he turns into a kind of destroyed madman himself—as if he has witnessed an atrocity that he will never recover from—and we see that certain ideas can be so corrosive as to ruin the mind that hosts them. The novel closes with the narrator’s “report” back to his teacher, a letter that regurgitates some of Strauch’s tirade with a degree of desperation, struggling to find a language with which to diagnose Strauch, settling finally on the awkward phrasing of “an amoral interstitial thinking without any declared purpose,” a disorder that has probably not yet made it into the DSM. Banging his head against “the unrevealing mysticism of one who is on the run from clarity,” the narrator in the end declares Strauch to be “much more miserably alone than one will be able to imagine even after reading my report.” This is a beautiful bit of modesty that defeats any sense that Strauch has been exaggerating his condition, deepening the already terrible black hole that surrounds him. It seems that Strauch isn’t the only one who paints in total darkness. His creator is rather fond of doing so as well.

Bernhard’s ambivalence toward the dramatic shape of a plotted story is already in evidence in Frost, yet he hadn’t quite determined how to supplant it, which leads to a static, sometimes overexcited investigation of Strauch and his manias: a novel that can function more as a perverse disclosure of a disease than as a suspenseful revelation of character. The subplots and secondary characters in Frost—intrigue at the inn and the neighboring village, which Strauch and the narrator sometimes gossip about—serve as peripheral animations to throw Strauch’s tirades into greater relief, but they also work to allow the reader some much-needed rest from the scorched-earth intensity of Strauch’s anger. The knacker, hauling around animal carcasses, is sleeping with the innkeeper, whose husband is in jail for murder; as characters they are somewhat less than human, driven entirely by their lower faculties and made to seem unduly crass and petty. A farmhouse burns, incinerating the animals within, which prompts a cheerful description of their burnt flesh. A woodcutter is killed. But these characters, and their intrigues, are more like hand puppets bobbing atop cardboard scenery, a bit of over-rigged, cartoonish entertainment in between bracing doses of death talk. Bernhard doesn’t seem particularly convinced by the dramatic potential of this material either, and so it is only lightly and erratically sketched, while Strauch is held in abeyance before he bombards us again with his rant against life. One senses the young Bernhard trying his hand at conventional narrative (an interest he would later abandon), dutifully serving up novelistic material to spackle together the far more potent torment issuing from Strauch, but it’s curious in a novel when adultery and animal fires, as well as general mayhem in the Austrian forest, can serve as light comic relief.

Bernhard finds little use in his novels for cheerful thoughts, happy people, or positive outcomes. Says the narrator of The Loser: “It’s always correct to say this or that person is an unhappy person . . .whereas it’s never correct to say that this or that person is a happy one.” Facile reasoning aside, his characters might be regarded as arguments, constructed to stifle any possibility of hope or joy, the opposite of what anyone—anyone, that is, with an interest in self-preservation—should want from a book. They petition, with a barrister’s authority, a bleak space, interrogating the purpose of life and regularly finding it hollow and terrible. “Who had the idea of letting people walk around on the planet,” asks the narrator,” or something called a planet, only to put them in a grave, their grave, afterwards?”

Who indeed? Yet the technique precisely describes the kind of jeopardy in which Bernhard routinely places hi characters, choosing to notice them just when their suffering is at its most intense. This procedure allows readers the unusual experience of witnessing people who operate under virtually no illusions, in the most extreme emotional circumstances, at war with fears that none of us can rightly deny. These are characters without the routine protective carapace of denial and evasion, and their raw assault on mortal problems can make them seem both heroic and doomed. As psychological specimens, they are among the most dour, depressed, angry, and alarmingly death-obsessed characters in the history of literature; and anecdotal assessment, of course, but if a device existed to measure the nihilism of a fictional character, it is hard to imagine that Bernhard’s creations would not peg the needle of the machine.

Bernhard’s mortal impulses place him in the company of another contemporary German-language writer, W.G. Sebald. Both were perfect adherents to Kafka’s credo to pursue the negative, because “the positive thing is given to us from the start.” Each produced portraits of devastated characters, ruined by both circumstance and self-generated torment, but their techniques diverged in stark ways. Whereas Sebald built a tranquil moat around his characters’ pain, Bernhard wheeled out the catapult and flung his characters into the fire, paying close attention to the sounds of their screams. In Sebald the emotion is buried under the veneer of manner and etiquette, and its repression and concealment create an exquisite pressure. We tiptoe around his characters and their elaborate denial, which, by its very banality, suggests to us extraordinary levels of pain that cannot be etched in language. They are so obliterated as to be beyond direct communication. Instead, they can talk about the flora and fauna in wistful ways, they can reminisce dully, and we are left to infer the depth of their grief. Sebald promoted his credo of subtlety and indirection when he declared that atrocity could not be rendered directly in literature, a rule that would seem to stuff rags into the mouths of Bernhard’s characters, who are so far from standing on ceremony that they may as well be crawling on their bellies through the dirt.

What does bind Bernhard and Sebald, beyond their instinct toward the inner darkness, is an interest in narrative techniques that moderate, and offset, the pain and anguish of their characters. Each frequently presents narrators whose chief function is to listen in on characters in pain, harvesting their suffering. Sebald’s quiet narrators work like mollusks on the encoded confessions that come to them, and it’s often the patience and curiosity of the narrators, or their simple drive to listen, that slowly draws in readers, until our own powers of detection are heightened and we can see the delicately buried signs of anguish. It is as though authorial choreography is not enough; an ally must be sent abroad into the text to work directly with the characters.

Bernhard, too, would prove to be obsessed with narrators who spy, effacing themselves in order to feed on a vaster world of feeling. In Frost, what keeps all of the madness and vitriol captivating is how elaborately it is mediated through the narrator, who breaks from direct quotation into stylized paraphrases, allowing the raw, spoken material from Strauch the refinements and range of literary prose. Strauch’s consciousness is artfully parceled for us to sound both more deranged and more provocative than it would if we were to listen directly to his monologues. This is not your best friend’s narcissism: boring and self- centered, repetitive, ignorant of its audience. Yet whenever Strauch worries his wound for too long, the relentlessness of the wrath quickly becomes numbing and theatrical. It strangely loses its conviction.

Bernhard would develop a keen instinct for techniques that allowed him to complicate what is sometimes the very basic message of his books (i.e., it hurts to be alive, and we might consider killing ourselves). Frequently, he would pair his characters with mute sidekicks, like the narrator in Frost, who absorb and filter the rage into readable form. This is Bernhard’s version of literary suspense: dangling his characters over sharp rocks, wringing from them their tortured confessions, which are then corseted into elegant prose by able chaperones. Frost is but a tentative step toward the mediation and rage processing that Bernhard would continue to hone in his later work. In books such as Extinction and Yes, Bernhard’s ranting narrators move away from their private testimony and manage also to shoulder a storytelling burden, saving these novels from overdrilling their own resources. A more refined antidote Bernhard discovered to this problem was to increase the curatorial range of his narrators, giving them access to larger and more varied territories, deepening the tragic circumstances that would provide the context for the novel. Correction, for example, plants its narrator among the posthumous papers of an architect who has just killed himself, since the perfect structure he built for his sister—a cone in the middle of a forest—has allowed her to consummate her own lifelong desire: to kill herself. The narrator, again unnamed and emotionally muted, can access both recollections and writings of his subject, Roithamer, in addition to his own memories of the man, which allows for a more complicated, contrapuntal force to develop, with multiple channels of content flowing into his shaping hands. The narrative moment of the novel is itself static—a man sits in a garret sorting through papers—but the territories the narrator can access to build a story are expansive and rich, allowing for a layered unfolding of circumstance and consequence.

If Frost is an apprentice work, a blast of raw feeling without the formal elegance of his later novels, it already heralds Bernhard’s urge not just to look death in the fact but to climb directly in its mouth and produce a fearless report of the architectural dimensions of a place that few of us care to imagine for very long. In writing that is remarkable for how close it takes us to our own ending, Bernhard is, finally, uplifting and revelatory, because he does not turn away from the most central and awful part of reality. His characters are so ruthlessly determined not to be fooled that they ruin themselves before our eyes. This is mercilessly honest work that shows the moral consequences of being highly alert to life, and it is terrifying to read. As the narrator of Frost says of his own report, “I could read the whole thing back, but I would only give myself a fright.” ■

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as “the most audacious literary debut in decades,” Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus’s first collection — part fiction, part handbook– as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings.

Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations — both comic and disturbing — in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

Praise

“The most audacious literary debut in decades — witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing, language itself held together here by whimsical bits of wire and string. Ben Marcus is a one-of-a-kind stand-up phenom, a comic writer of power and originality. The Age of Wire and String marks the arrival of a unique new talent in American letters.” — Robert Coover

“An extraordinary first novel. . . . The Age of Wire and String, a treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature.” — Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

“A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful. A world appears made of birds, dogs, odd bits of the Self, and ancient impressions of the very first things — Father and Mother, strange foods, a storm in the sky outside — all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home.” — Donald Antrim

“In his entirely self-generated possible world, Ben Marcus immolates American notions about family, culture, and the domestic drama, and asks questions later. What remains in the epicenter of the conflagration are fragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments — written in some of the most breathtaking prose I’ve encountered lately.” — Rick Moody

“This book is a coolly lyrical, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-scientific description of the Earth and the life of its various populations — as though Marcus were a sociologist describing the world in which everything is wired to everything else. . . . The Age of Wire and String anticipates a career devoted to intelligent exploration of major themes.” — Kelly Cherry, Chicago Tribune

“Simply put, The Age of Wire and String defies all the literary traditions we hold dear, more so than any other novel in recent memory. . . . [It] is raw ether, a work of literary chemistry that will soften your brain and sharpen your senses.” — Weekly Alibi

“Don’t walk into this world expecting to know which way is up; just sit back and enjoy the view from a completely new perspective.” — Details

“Marcus proves himself a renegade philosopher/writer who twists language until it bleeds new meaning, and in the process creates a truly audacious and wholly original view of life and the linguistic structures which give it substance. . . . In a book industry increasingly dominated by convention and the next sure thing, we can only hope that writers who dare to explore this inner vision will continue to find an audience.” — Tucson Weekly

“His stories, a series of interlocking definitions of strange new objects and principles, are a mix of gothic gargoyles and glassy ultra-modern surfaces, whether he’s describing an automobile from the ground up, or a nap in front of the TV with the family dog.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Genre Artist

If a story takes place, as we are told stories do, then who or what does it take that place from, and why is an acquisition verb—take—necessary to describe the activity of stories? Maybe it’s an unfair, literalizing question. Not all figures of speech need to be prodded for accuracy (although shouldn’t a phrase relating to stories, which are made of language, have some passing precision?). Stories would keep taking place whether or not we worried about what it meant for them to do so, or worried about what stories actually did instead. But if we poked at this strange phrase, which suggests a theft of setting in order for narrative to occur, we might also deduce that if a place is taken for something to happen in it, then this taking must happen at a specific time (that’s what the word “happen” asks us to believe, anyway). The verb “take” presumes duration, implies a moment (unless we take a break from time or take the opportunity to no longer experience time, options that are difficult, at best, to secure, unless we die). It is this specific time that is meant to concern us when we encounter what is likely the most well known (i.e., terrifying) story opener of all: once upon a time.

Imbedded in this innocent phrase, which I would like to prod for the rest of this paragraph until it leaks an interesting jelly, is a severally redundant claim of occurrence, perhaps the first thing a reader, or listener, must be promised (reader: consumer of artificial time). For the sake of contrast, to look at a more rigorously dull example, the opener “I have an idea” does not offer the same hope, or seduction, or promise (particularly if I am the “I”). Even the verb is static and suggests nothing approximating a moment. Time is being excluded, and look at all the people already falling asleep. “Once upon a time” is far more promising (something happened, something happened!). We might need to believe that the clock is ticking before we begin to invest our sympathies, our attentions, our energy.

Fiction has, of course, since dropped this ingratiating, hospitable opener in favor of subtler seductions, gentler heraldings of story. But it is rare not to feel the clock before the first page is done, a verb moving the people and furniture around (whereas “having an idea” does not allow us to picture anything, other than, possibly, a man on a toilet). The physical verbs are waiting to assert themselves, to provide moments that we are meant to believe in, and verbs, traditionally, are what characters use to stir up the trouble we call fiction. Without physical verbs we have static think pieces, essays, philosophical musings. There is no stirring, because generally there is nobody there holding a spoon. This will be an interesting distinction to remember.

Maybe this is as it should be, since Proust said the duty of the literary artist was to tell the truth about time. Aside from blanching at the notion of duty, which is one of the required notions to blanch at, it seems clear to me that Proust’s edict, interpreted variously, has served as a bellwether for most thriving traditions of fiction (which held true, of course, before Proust articulated it). If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a methodology, a criteria, a standard, a purpose (is there anything else left for fiction to have?), it would be time itself. Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to become time. Without time, fiction is nonfiction. Yes, that’s arguable—we have Borges, Roussel, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Robbe-Grillet, after all, among others, to tell us otherwise, and it is in part their legacy, their followers (witting or not), whose pages will be shaken here until we have something that counts for a portrait of this anti-story tradition.

One basic meaning of narrative, then: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depictions of time.

It sounds facile to say that stories occur, but it is part of the larger, relentless persuasion that time both is and envelops the practice we call story. We cannot easily separate the two. Yet if time is the most taken-for-granted aspect of fiction writing, it would seem precisely like the good hard wall a young, ambitious writer would want to bang his head against, in order to walk and talk newly in the world of fiction (that’s still the desire, right?). To the writer searching for the obstacle to surpass, time would look plenty worthy a hurdle. If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired at this point (there’s time again, aging what was once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without, and therefore, to grow or change, must.

Time must die.

John Haskell is among an intriguing new group of writers chiseling away at the forms of fiction writing without appearing exhaustingly experimental (read: unreadable). Haskell is working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well, literally timeless (which is not yet to say that his debut book is for the ages). Yes, I said “inert,” because things do not have to move to be interesting. Think mountain. Think dead person. Think thought. I say “think,” because Haskell is a thinker, and although he writes often about film, you could not film what he writes.

I Am Not Jackson Pollock contains some storylike moments, but it is primarily a new kind of fiction, one that, curiously, hardly seems interested in fiction at all (which is not to suggest that it reads autobiographically—the opposite is true, which makes a great case for secret-keeping). Haskell might be indebted to Borges, but not in the way most so-called imaginative writers are. There’s no obsession with infinity and worlds within worlds, no conceptual masterminding at work to showcase a stoner’s tripped-out, house-of-Escher mentality, not much that would qualify as being made up. Haskell is more interested in using modest, unassuming forms of nonfiction, as did Borges or Sterne (albeit Haskell does not perpetrate extravagant untruths): the essay, the report, the biographical sketch, the character analysis (this last is Haskell’s favorite, from real people like Glenn Gould and Jackson Pollock, to film characters like Anthony Perkins’s innkeeper in Psycho, to Topsy, the first elephant executed by electricity). Haskell does not write characters so much as he writes about them, and it is this willful instinct toward exposition that is so curiously distinctive and unusual in the story-driven world of most new fiction.

A fair question here might be this: where is the fiction in this, if these “stories” of Haskell’s refuse story and then faithfully essay to supply information, respectable information, analysis, and reflection, just as nonfiction might? And one fair answer might be: John Haskell’s primary fiction, overriding his entire project, the place where his fiction is located, is precisely in his puzzling gesture of calling these pieces fiction in the first place. He is fictionalizing his genre. Or, in other words, his fiction is genre itself. Haskell is not an artist in a particular genre, he is an artist of genre.

To do what Haskell does is to take several genuine risks, which occasions a word or two about risk. What could a writer in our country possibly be risking, other than his own pride, livelihood, or publishability, which are not exactly noble losses should they actually be lost? (Many of us began writing without pride and publishability anyway, and I’m not exactly clear what livelihood is.) Yet risk is the most urgent exhortation of what we are supposed to take when we write fiction (which is somehow different from the kind of taking a story does when it takes place). Fiction is praised when it is called “risky,” but this sort of risk usually involves shattering, shameful disclosures. (I could fill the rest of this essay with examples of shattering, shameful disclosures, but maybe just one will do: while wrestling with my dog, experimenting on a new hold called “the Sumatra,” we ended up horizontal on the lawn, head to toe, and thereupon commenced a directed nuzzling, a purposeful mouth-to-balls activity, that in some quarters of academe is referred to as the sixty-nine, which then became a standard “variation” on the “Sumatra,” well into adulthood (especially into adulthood)). With secret-telling having become its own lucrative industry, it’s hard to fathom what a risk of subject-matter might be (though I’m certain better, scarier secrets are approaching in next season’s books, however ill-equipped my imagination is to conceive them).

Risks of form, on the other hand, might seem more provocative, more inherently interesting to those attuned to the established modes and means of fiction writing (Hey, you guys!), but the risk more often cited in these cases is the financial sort that a publisher takes in publishing such work. They risk not selling enough books. And they are sorry but they cannot take that risk (it is interesting that the writer is supposed to be risky while the publisher is not). Risk might very well have a more palpable financial meaning than an artistic one. So while it is no longer clear what literary risk is—perhaps the term has been molested to death, like those other harassed words: edgy, innovative, startling, stunning—it could be more appropriate to say that within the larger, hapless chance-taking of writing at all (when indifference is about the scariest, and likeliest, response most of us might face), writing fiction without story seems especially curious, willfully self-marginalizing, and therefore very much worth considering. (No, not all obscure literary gestures are “interesting,” but something akin to playing golf without one’s body, as John Haskell might be doing, is.)

The shopworn adage “show-don’t-tell” reinforces the ethos that fiction must have a story, and warns a writer away from discursive, essayistic moments and exposition, which apparently amount to a kind of quicksand for the writer (a statement that presupposes motion as a valuable aspect of fiction writing). Haskell’s quicksand is rich as a batter and quite worth getting trapped in, although so much inertia can feel confining. If we are to be cast in mud, and then smothered, we want our demise to be fascinating. Telling is supposedly insufficient, it cannot produce a quality demise, since it does not dramatize a moment, or in fact does not even supply a moment at all. Telling is stingy with time. Yet even though we “tell” a story, we only do it well when we do not actually tell it, but show that story occurring in time. Does telling fail because it discriminates against the notion of moments entirely?

Take this paragraph in Haskell’s story, “The Faces of Joan of Arc.”

Hedy Lamarr, through most of the movie, takes the side of those in authority, which is not the same as having authority. Obedience is a way of reconciling oneself to a lack of authority or a lack of choice. But it’s not the only way.

This is a funny (read: not-so-funny) way to start a section in a story, but this is Haskell in his psychological mode, and it’s a tone he turns to frequently, which can make parts of this book sound eerily similar to the DSM-IV-TR Case Studies: A Clinical Guide to Differential Diagnosis. His exposition is dutiful and persistent, but he oddly does not seem to be using it to generate sympathy, which is what a narrative writer might hope for after disclosing details of character. Minimalism in fiction, which at its best extracted psychology purely from surfaces, would be anathema to Haskell. One of his favorite things to do, his pet point throughout the book, is to probe the interior conflicts within a character, but the effect is rather more coldly intellectual than warmly empathic:

She creates a space between what she does and who she feels she is, so at least she can live with a little peace.He wanted to let whatever it was inside of him come out, and then change it, and by changing that he was hoping everything else would change.

Inside that bubble he could relax and let who he was come out.

She waited until what the camera wanted was fairly close to what she wanted, and although this wasn’t a perfect arrangement, she could pretend to stand it.

… the man wanted to bring out whatever it was inside the boy.

Haskell is expert at clarifying the moments when his characters feel estranged from themselves. The defiance of Haskell’s title is a form of self-denial echoed throughout most of these stories. He is so shrewd at depicting this sort of moment, that for him it is apparently sufficient to carry whole stories. Once he has achieved the revelation, he seems ready to end his story. If he has a deficiency, it’s his inability to convert his fascinations into whole pieces of writing that prove the artistic adequacy of his idea. If Haskell is desperate to show us how people hide from themselves and conspire against their own better interests, working as multiple identities in agonizing contexts—which is, after all, a familiar enough idea routinely explored, or dramatized, by many writers—then it’s upon him to make our experience of this idea immediate, visceral, and potently refreshed. Maybe it’s not upon him, but when the idea is centralized, as it is in Haskell’s work, and narrative is deliberately excluded, there is a risk when that idea does not seem novel.

To be fair, Haskell has no real comforting tradition to fall back on, to guide him in his efforts, so he must invent for himself what an ending, in this sort of writing, might look like. It’s an original path he has chosen, and it will be rewarding to watch this exceptional writer as he navigates this new territory for fiction.

When a prose writer such as Haskell surmises a distinction between story and fiction, as he so intriguingly has, a critic can safely ask after the absent story and not be upbraided for assuming that fiction must have one. A writer thus interested anyway in dividing the two projects risks an error of category, or at the least risks being read incorrectly (not that reading correctly sounds like a very compelling thing to be doing). But when, for example, David Markson, an expository novelist who fired the starting gun for fictions of information and proved that pure exposition can be alarmingly moving, who purposefully tells instead of shows, is dismissed in The New York Times for failing to provide a story in his novel Reader’s Block, no discussion follows about why, exactly, fiction must have one (at 150 words in the book review, how could any discussion follow?). Nor do we learn what a story might have looked like in such an exquisitely felt book that, to summarize, catalogs the various ways historical figures have hated whole races of people and/or died by their own hands. (Yes, you should read this book.)

Markson should have presumably, under the fiction-must-have-a-story criteria, zeroed in on one of his hundreds of characters and gone deep, doing that good old-time psychological work, the person-making stuff, dramatizing how such an interesting fellow had gone on to hate Jews and/or kill himself. Markson should have used more words like “then.” He should have sequenced. He seems to have forgotten that literature is supposedly a time-based art.

Markson’s amnesia is one of the happy accidents of the last decade of fiction writing. By eschewing a fetishistic, conventional interest in character, or a dutiful allegiance to moment creation, to occurrence itself, Markson accomplishes what a story, slogging through time and obedient to momentum, arguably could not: a commanding, obsessive portrait of single behaviors throughout history, a catalog of atrocity that overwhelms through relentless example. In truth, it’s a novel that can be read as an essay, but unlike most essays, it’s lyrically shrewd, poetry in the form of history, and it’s brave enough to provide creepy, gaping holes where we normally might encounter context (the burden of the conventional essayist).

This might explain a new category of writing, the lyric essay, swelling special issues of literary magazines (such as The Seneca Review) and, in particular, a new, provocative anthology: The Next American Essay, edited (orchestrated, masterminded, realized) by John D’Agata, the form’s single-handed, shrewd champion. The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all of the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened that a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. The lyric essay is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it is apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret here is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers take note. Some of the best fiction is these days being written as nonfiction.

The Next American Essay proceeds chronologically from 1975 to 2003, from John McPhee (a re-animated Monopoly game) to Jenny Boully (all footnotes, no text), with D’Agata practicing his own artful transitions before each piece, waxing witty, smart, personal, mute, cleverly obtuse, passionate, lucid, myopic. D’Agata’s transitions alone, which show how alive an anthology can be, and would make any editor envious, provide a toolbox of categorically adulterous leapfrogs that could outfit a whole new generation of writers with the skills to launch an impressive and relevant movement of writing. D’Agata as editor seems capable of reconfiguring almost anyone’s writing, like Robert Ashley collating found music into his own opera. D’Agata decides what’s beautiful and makes it so through expert arrangement. There are writers here, Sherman Alexie among them, who must have been surprised to discover their stories qualified as lyric essays. D’Agata justifies the choice of Alexie by claiming that fiction is a protective term, providing shelter for difficult material, which is really essayistic in nature. All fiction writers should be so lucky.

The flagship practitioner of the lyric essay, who seems early on to have inspired D’Agata’s editorial imagination, is the Canadian poet Anne Carson. Under the banner of poetry, Carson has produced some of the most rigorously intelligent and beautiful writing of the last ten years: essays, stories, arguments, poems, most provocatively in her early collection, Plainwater. Her piece, “Short Talks,” which she describes as one-minute lectures, and which moves through the history of philosophy like a flip-book of civilization, offering stern commandments and graceful fall-aways, simultaneously qualifies as fiction, poetry, and essay, and is championed protectively by ambassadors from each genre.

The loose criteria for the lyric essay seems to invoke a kind of nonfiction not burdened by research or fact, yet responsible (if necessary) to sense and poetry, shrewdly allegiant to no expectations of genre other than the demands of its own subject. If that sounds strangely like fiction, several of the writers included here, Harry Mathews, Carole Maso, and Lydia Davis among them, first published their pieces in that genre, and will no doubt continue to. Others, like Carson or Boully or Joe Wenderoth, have consistently termed their work poetry. Thalia Field has published her singular writing under the label of fiction, although it seems better read as poetry. Here, of course, it is an essay, as are works of autobiography. David Antin shows up with more of his astonishingly boring diaries, continuing his decades-long ruse of consequence. Thankfully he cannot single-handedly ruin an anthology. David Shields provides a Lishian catalog of clichés that accrue curious meanings and expose how revealing banal language can actually be. And stalwarts like Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and Susan Sontag throw in with fierce, ambitious contributions that actually always were essays, although this lack of genre-hopping is in the minority.

Sadly absent from what is otherwise one of the most significant anthologies published in years are a few true voices of the essay who would have fit right in with these other inspired eccentrics, among them: Daniel Harris, Lawrence Weschler, Joy Williams, and Dallas Wiebe.

One instantly wonders how the chosen genre appellation liberates or constricts the writer, and whether or not John Haskell, absent from D’Agata’s all-star selection, would have fared better (whatever that might mean) under a different label, with someone like D’Agata warming-up for him. Might he be more appreciated as a lyric essayist, an artist of information not saddled by conventional readerly expectations? I ask because Haskell seems to suffer slightly when evaluated as a fiction writer, when one brings hopes of story to his book, which are hard not to bring. There’s the implied tedium of fiction not driven by story, particularly if a reader is expecting one (of course tedium, as Robbe-Grillet showed, can have its thrills). With storyless fiction, one suspects an intellectual lesson is at hand, instead of entertainment (this must either be fun or it must be good for me), with a reader’s pleasure not high on the author’s agenda. Expectation can flatten a reader’s willingness to forestall desires for story. It is similar to feeling forever trapped in a flashback, waiting for the current scene. A reader saves attention and energy if he senses that what he’s reading is not primary, the thing itself, and that the real story is ahead, and attention is the commodity the writer is striving to create, at all costs. Haskell’s book could very nearly be shelved uncontested in the film studies section of the bookstore, and here it might perform its rogue fictionalizations with more astonishment, reversing his style of ambush, so to speak, since it is much more a collection of film studies with bursts of unreality, than it is a burst of unreality with moments of film studies.

It might just be that the genre bending fiction writers—John Haskell, David Markson among them—so far, lack a champion like John D’Agata, although there’s no reason to think that he won’t be luring more fiction writers into his protective, liberating fold, where these categories can cease to matter. Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and for its formal originality.