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The Flame Alphabet
by Ben Marcus
Hardcover : 304 pages
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A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of ...
Introduction
In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents? sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn?t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus's position in the first rank of American novelists.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012: From the dark, curious imagination of Ben Marcus comes another brain melter of a novel. The Flame Alphabet has a pandemic premise--children are slowly killing their parents by speaking--and only gets stranger and smarter from there. When Sam leaves his decaying family behind to seek a cure for his daughter's lethal condition, he winds up in a government think tank that casually eliminates human subjects in its quest for an antidote. Stories don?t get much more horrifying than this, but Marcus's absorbing, conversational style makes his twisted bildungsroman as difficult to put down as it is to accept. In an unimaginable situation, Sam takes the only steps that seem possible: He submits, he works, he dreams of his wife and child. This cruel, insightful meditation on societal dysfunction and individual resilience comes from a mind that must be appreciated, even if you find yourself relieved that it's not your own. --Mia Lipman
Featured Guest Review: Jonathan Lethem on The Flame Alphabet
Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels, including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn and two short story collections, and he has edited and contributed to several anthologies. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's, and many other periodicals. His latest book of essays, The Ecstacy of Influence, explores the role of writers in contemporary culture.
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.Excerpt
By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting. ... view entire excerpt...Discussion Questions
No discussion questions at this time.Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
A conversation with Ben Marcus, author of THE FLAME ALPHABET Q) THE FLAME ALPHABET opens with Samuel and his wife Claire preparing to evacuate amid a frightening epidemic: the speech of children has become lethal. They’re leaving Esther, their 14-year-old daughter, to save themselves. How did this story first come to you, what sparked it? A) I wanted to write a book that begins with trouble. There’s trouble at home, there’s trouble in the world, and each crowds in on the other. This trouble had to be something that fascinated me, something I could connect to in the most personal way, because to me this makes the writing more urgent. When I thought of what I could never give up, what would kill me to lose, it was my family, my kids. After that, it was language. I was so unable to imagine my life without language that I became obsessed with trying to tell a story about a world where language is poisonous, where speech kills, where words are sickening. And when I tried to factor children into it, it seemed that if they were immune to this poison they would become intensely powerful. Children could use language as a weapon, even against those they love. So these ideas started to swirl around, and they worried me, and they upset me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them, which meant I had to try to write a novel to see what would happen. Q) Against a background of apocalyptic fallout, a focal point of THE FLAME ALPHABET remains the family: Samuel and Claire’s marriage, the experience of raising a teenager, of being a teenager. Why did you decide to focus on the private life of one family in all the chaos? A) To me The Flame Alphabet isn’t so much the story of a crisis in the world as it is the story of how individual people try to love each other through impossible odds. A family protects you from the world, but it also heightens your vulnerability. Nobody knows you as well as the people in your family, and to be known is to be found out, which for some people can be unbearable. Loving a child can be unbearable because in some ways the love can’t really be requited, but also because as parents we’ve seen bad stuff happen and we can begin to imagine the nightmare of something befalling our kids. So families induct us into a world of the most intense joy and happiness, but also, unfortunately, heartbreak and pain. The family might be the greatest stage for the most dramatic stories. Fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, love and resentment, loyalty and betrayal. It’s a petri dish for tragedy. Q) A major theme of THE FLAME ALPHABET is, of course, language. Its power, limitations, proliferation, all taken to the extreme. What were you trying to explore about the way we communicate? And were there any complications or surprises in writing a book in which language itself is a killer? A) I was thinking of sticks and stones. We know what they do. But names, language, words, supposedly can never hurt us. Which of course is not true. Esther, in The Flame Alphabet, even before the speech fever hits, has a terrible power over her parents. Even though she’s a teenager and she’s dependent on them—needs them for food and safety—she has words, and since Sam and Claire love her so much, she has the ability to hurt them with what she says. Inside the boundary of a family, language is tremendously powerful, and sometimes scary. In the myth of the Tower of Babel, God is threatened by the language of people, how it unites them, so he scrambles their speech, keeps them from understanding each other. Language is dangerous because it can make us think we understand how the world works—we use words to explain the world to ourselves, but it all might be an illusion. In the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah there’s the notion that we can never understand the world, which is God’s creation—God is, by definition, inconceivable. If we find ourselves explaining things, then we’re already wrong. Language can’t touch the truth. Explanation itself is immodest, arrogant. The truth is unspoken, it cannot be written down. It’s not even thought. Language erects a false reality, fools us. So, then, it’s not so much of a stretch, in a novel, to think of language as even more ruinous, literally toxic, and to wonder about the cataclysm that might come if we abuse the weapon of language. One of the challenges in writing a novel about this was that suddenly no one could talk to each other. My characters were going to be walled off from each other, there’d be no dialogue. I thought a lot about that—what do you do when every body is mute? I hope my solutions—which I shouldn’t reveal here, because that would be a spoiler!—were interesting. Q) A strange, enigmatic (and imagined) sect of Judaism plays a large role in the life of the family and in the larger plot of the book. Can you talk a bit about this sect you created, why it plays such a large role, and how your own Jewish heritage informed your imagining? A) As a writer I have always wanted to invent a religion. I think of religions as works of the imagination, which isn’t to belittle them. We invent religion out of our deep desire for meaning, to feel that our existence matters, that we have a purpose. It’s one of civilization’s greatest imaginative acts—to posit where we came from, how we got here, and what we’re supposed to do now. I see it as a novelistic task: a religion must be compelling, it must be believable. It must be otherworldly and yet still pose as the truth. It has characters, it has stories. The Flame Alphabet, with its interest in the mythic power of language, was already driven by religious questions, so it seemed natural to invent a religion for Sam and Claire. But I quickly determined that it would seem silly to make something up, with a made-up name. Or, not silly, but unreal, and therefore of little consequence. No one would believe it. I wanted the invented religion to seem like it was one that might already be out there, so I needed to use an existing religion that could accommodate sects, offshoots, cults. A religion that has a flexible enough philosophy that would allow for something like the forest worship invented in the book. And that was Judaism. Of course as I got into it, and found my characters going to a hidden synagogue in the woods, where the Rabbi’s sermon was pumped in by a strange radio that needed to be tended with grease, well, I grew uncomfortable. Religions have lots of metaphors of how word comes down from on-high, and in The Flame Alphabet, Sam and Claire are anxious that their radio won’t work, that they won’t be able to hear the Rabbi, or that the Rabbi’s message itself will possibly have been tampered with. This stuff made me uneasy, which is something I look for when I write: a situation I can’t quite understand, that seems strange, and yet that I can’t stop thinking about. It turns out that I was very interested in the dark mechanics of how a message from a purported God can make it safely down to the people below. We know that messages erode as they are transmitted, and this turns out to be something that matters a lot in the novel. I was brought up Jewish, but in the informal way that probably defines a lot of people from my generation. Religious faith wasn’t presented to me as a requirement, something I had to have. My parents were liberal—my mother was raised in an Irish Catholic family, and my father was raised in a Jewish one. My Jewish identity was more cultural than anything else: I found it in the writers I read. Malamud and Bellow and Roth were important to me, but their depictions of Judaism were much more explicit than anything I experienced in my life. I had a sense of religion being far more private than communal. And I always thought of Judaism as a religion that had no real reputation for recruitment, no desire to convert non-believers. So while I have always responded to writers who deal with the Jewish experience in their work, I had yet to figure out how I might do that, in a way that made sense to me as a writer. The Flame Alphabet is maybe the beginning of this process for me. In the book, religion is strange, unknowable, slippery, and it even might be dangerous. Or, of course, it might be the illusionary creation of someone who means you harm. It can connect you as much as it isolates you. It can be a repository for your fears, while also inflaming them. Q) What is the flame alphabet? It sounds made up, but it’s an existing concept in Judaism. The flame alphabet is a way to refer to the Torah: the word of God, written in fire. When I first read about it I was amazed. The idea of a language too blinding to look at, something too intense to understand. Hebrew letters are all richly symbolic. The alphabet is seen as a system for knowledge, a powerful and dangerous one. It’s a set of building blocks for unlocking the secrets to the world. It’s still true, even if it’s easy to forget this now. We use this system to make all of our wisdom. I also should say that, in the book, I’ve taken some liberties with the idea of the flame alphabet. As frequently happens with religions, it is subject to grave misinterpretations, manipulations. Schemers get a hold of it and bend the meaning to their own interests. So, along with inventing a religion, I also wanted to show how people abuse their own religions and manipulate other people by stoking their fear. And I decided on the title because it was suggestive of a language that would hurt us to consume. We’d be blinded if we saw it. We’d be ruined. An alphabet of fire seems hazardous, and this propelled the book for me. Q) The form of THE FLAME ALPHABET is quite different from your previous work, like Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. There is a single narrative voice that takes us through the story. Had you been itching to try the classic novel form or did the style grow out of the kind of story you were telling? A) My earlier books had multiple narrators, multiple timelines, multiple, uh, personalities, and so I did think a lot about a simpler approach to the storytelling, to see what would happen. I hadn’t tried this before and I wanted to do something new. I wanted the book to move very quickly, to have a lot of suspense and momentum. It seemed to suit the story. There’s dark stuff in this book, a lot of sorrow, and a lot of strangeness. A high velocity narrative seemed like a good way to carry everything, to keep readers interested. Q) Do you think about genre when you write? Is it all fiction or do you consider your work to veer into the science fiction realm? Or other? A) I don’t think too much about genre when I write. The boundaries always seem to shift, don’t they, and so many writers I love seem to gleefully surf from genre to genre, sampling the riches from all kinds of literature. I love those writers who bend reality a little bit, but who somehow also seem to occupy their own category, a genre unto themselves: Borges, Calvino, Donald Barthelme. And there are writers working now who seem too slippery to pin down, because (to me, anyway), they love many kinds and styles of writing, among them, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Michael Chabon, Lydia Davis. In these writers you can find traditional, hurtling narrative, deep strangeness, achingly tender story-telling, and, above all, a clear love of language. I could name many more. Sometimes I try to just forget about genres and simply read what seems exciting, what seems vital and alive. Q) You teach writing at Columbia University in New York City. How has your writing changed or been informed by your teaching, if at all? A) A great thing about teaching is that I can be surrounded by committed writers and readers, people who believe in stories and literature and the power of language. It’s a great work place, because as different as the students might be from each other, they all believe in the possibility for fiction to move and compel us, to be entertaining, and when I see students striving to write things that matter I am moved by it. The question of how my own writing has been changed by teaching is a good one, and I’m not sure I know how to answer it. I’ve been teaching for over twenty years, with only short breaks along the way, so I’d have to imagine an alternative universe in order to guess how I would have written if I hadn’t taught. But I will say that I’ve always thrived on keeping some feelings and ideas and hunches to myself, so I can be alone with a private world. I try to keep my own writing sheltered from my work as a teacher. I get nervous about talking things through too much. A danger in teaching is that sometimes you’re pressed to be knowing about things that can’t really be known or explained. I love uncertainty and what it does for my interest in writing. It’s such a motivator. But it’s hard to cling to in the classroom. For me, some things have to remain unknown in order for me to stay curious about them, to see them as potentially worth writing about. Q) What are you working on now? A) I am finishing a collection of short stories, which will be published in 2013. The stories have come out in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and some other places. Once I turn that in I want to start a new novel, but I don’t yet know what that will be. I want to find something new that I can’t stop thinking about. From the publisherBook Club Recommendations
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