12.30.2011
Featured Guest Review: Jonathan Lethem on The Flame Alphabet
Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language. We already knew this, from the outrageous stories, and from Notable American Women. When I call him an “inventor,” I’m seeking a little working distance from the bland (and often dismissive) term “experimental”–for if Marcus is conducting experiments, he’s conducting them out of view, and then unveiling the results as a fait accompli, like an Edison or Tesla or some other secular magician emerging from a laboratory. Marcus’s work, with its powerful kinship to the visual arts and music and perhaps even pharmacology, should less be copyrighted than patented. His devices can enchant and wreck your mind. Like I say, we already knew this.
What we didn’t know, and I suppose possibly he didn’t either until he blew the wrought-iron clawfeet off his own prototype and replaced them with white-walls and a souped-up engine, is how thrilling it would be to see Marcus apply his gifts to something closer to traditional narrative. I say that as if it’s some drab operation (“apply” and “traditional”) but in fact what The Flame Alphabet has done is open up a kind of wide-screen view of the sort of crazy Ben Marcus movie that was likely always playing in his brain but which he has now taken out for wide release.
It appears that all the giddy anxiety and sorrowful vertigo of Marcus’s language was only the leading edge of an implicit sense of pure story, the kind where figures in a landscape struggle to negotiate outrageous danger, loss and mystery. The book is an urban ironist’s reply to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, yet in a way I think it is braver and more wrenching even than McCarthy’s book (as well as, as you’d expect, more peculiar and funny, and less infused with wearisome machismo) because of the greater degree of complicity it admits, complicity with the disasters that flow through our collective world but are also locatable in each and every one of us if we’re ready to meet them there.
The Flame Alphabet explodes with human drama without for one single line relinquishing Marcus’s lifelong commitment to the drama of a sentence making itself known on the page. In fact, and this is surely the most brilliant thing about the book, it fuses those two notions of drama into one immutable and bizarre whole. That’s what’s known in show business as a spoiler, but I couldn’t resist.
Read the review on Amazon.com.
