Writing

A short story, published in The New Yorker, on May 29, 2018

“There is only one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out, wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors, grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they were being chased by men with guns.”

Read the story at The New Yorker.

A short story, published in The New Yorker, on October 2, 2017

“It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Ida’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching, when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt?”

Read the story at The New Yorker.

A short story, published in The New Yorker, on October 19, 2015

“This happened. Kids tested their attachments. They tried to push you away to see just how much it would take to really lose you. As a parent, you took the blow, even sharpened the knife yourself before handing it to the little fiends, who stepped right up and plunged. Or so Martin had heard.”

Read the story at The New Yorker.

A short story, published in The New Yorker on June 8, 2015.

“Tonight’s party was in one of those long, skinny city apartments you’re supposed to verbally fellate with praise. It was like walking into a tiny, dismal doghouse, a real doghouse, and then kissing the furred ass of the dog who lived there, who was super annoyed to have you clogging up his tiny room. You were allowed to stay as long as you kept using your tongue.”

Read the story at The New Yorker.

A short story, published in The New Yorker on May 20, 2013.

“It was meant to be a romantic medical-tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment at the clinic up on the hill.”

Read the whole story at The New Yorker.

Notes from the Hospital

[Note: Twelve years ago, Albert Mobilio of Bookforum asked me to interview David Markson.  These are the questions I sent. Unfortunately the interview was never completed.]

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Dear David Markson,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to these questions.  If any seem uninteresting to you, please disregard them and I’ll send others.   As you can see from recent issues of Bookforum, the interviews are published in a straight Q&A format, with a short introductory paragraph.  I am a serious admirer of your work—I think it is brave, devastating, and original.  This is what I will try to communicate in my short intro and questions.  I hope that we can construct an interesting conversation together.  If you need to call me, please try xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Yours,

Ben Marcus

1.

There’s an intriguing shift from Wittgenstein’s Mistress to Reader’s Block.  Reader’s Block contains almost no setting, and no real time-based narrative.  In one sense, this might be described as a shift from dramatization to exposition, which is curious, because in some low-lying writing cultures, exposition is supposedly deadly, inert territory.  Yet you have replaced scenes—the typical currency of fiction—w/ anecdotes of historical facts, and you’ve stopped vying for verisimiltude, in the conventional sense.  Exposition has become the means for a new kind of drama.  How did this become appealing to you as a form for fiction?

2.

During the heyday of metafiction in the sixties, writers like Barth and Coover were practicing a craft-conscious form of narrative, drawing our attention to the way the piece of fiction was made.  Thirty years later, in Reader’s Block and This is Not a Novel, and now in Vanishing Point, you seem to have done something entirely new with what was once known as metafiction, which had long since been abandoned by writers who found it too cerebral and dry, limited in emotional range.  How is that, for you, a self-conscious literary mode seemed the best way to yield so devastating a result?  Metafiction would have seemed like one of the least likely places to encounter such an emotional book.

3.

What are the interesting problems that occur for you while writing a novel?

4.

Does the word experimental mean anything to you?  How do you locate yourself in the contemporary fiction culture?  Is originality something you value and consciously pursue?  And, if so, what are the risks for you?

5.

The title of your book, Reader’s Block, draws attention to the fact that a reader can fail at something too.  The book evokes something not so frequently discussed: readerly ability, willingness, motivation.  While it would seem dangerous to become nostalgic for a time when reading was a skill and not just the opening of a slack orifice, it does create a challenge for an artist who happens to work with language.  Is being demanding a function, or a necessary result, of writing artistically?  If the actual ability to read and decipher a sentence is diminishing, does that concern you as a writer?  And do you have a particular relationship, at least in theory, to readers?

6.

In This is Not a Novel, do you believe the claim of your title?  Are you proposing a new genre of fiction, or are you more interested in the irony, the way a potent fiction can be concealed in something we might otherwise view as fact-based?

7.

Vanishing Point takes the expository, informational urge further than any of your previous books.  It is almost entirely an assemblage of historical facts, lyricised into chilling, miniature statistics.  Does this approach, as a compositional strategy, present any problems for you?  I was wondering how you construed momentum, a traditional, valued attribute of the novel.  You nevertheless achieve a tremendous, almost crushing feeling of closure.  How have you conceived the order of your material, and when is it that you are finished?

8.

Vanishing Point has almost entirely escaped its metafictional context, exemplified by references to a character called Author, who is writing a book.  Could a novel work for you that is purely a collection of stylized historical anecdotes?  How crucial to you are the references to Author?

9.  Could you discuss how you use grammar to turn simple facts into loaded elements of your novels.  It strikes me that, through style, you find the dramatic core of a statement that, if phrased differently, might seem compeletly intert.

This is the first Single Sentence Animation from Recommended Reading, Electric Literature’s new weekly fiction magazine.

Edwin Rostron animates a sentence from “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” by Ben Marcus. Music by Supreme Vagabond Craftsman.

The sentence: “We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.”

Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.