BEN Marcus’ books are difficult to categorise within fiction. ‘Experi­mental’ is the most apt term used to denote his work; but he is a mainstream author, gaining further momentum with his second set of short stories, and fourth book overall. Previously he charted new linguistic frontiers with his novel, Notable American Women, and short story collection, The Age of Wire and String. He followed up on those with The Flame Alphabet, a more traditional novel that critiqued language and the concept of novels. With his latest offering, Leaving the Sea, he brings together all his experiments in a single binding. Even though the stories are all about the worst version of himself that the author can conjure in words, they are each different, and told with dissimilar voices. For its anthological properties, and because the language glitters in places, this book deserves a slot in reading lists for the summer.

Marcus is a smart writer. This is evident from the arrangement of the stories in this collection. They get harder to read as the book progresses. They also start off with traditional three-arc narratives, and then go into the hardcore material, including one six-page story told in seven sentences, the first of which takes up five and a half pages.

If story collections must all be themed, then this one is about white 30-something males who are profoundly insecure of their sexual appeal, and feel like failures otherwise as well. The despair is palpable from the first story, ‘What Have You Done?’, in which the narrator’s family refuses to believe that he has a wife and child, or at least he thinks that they never believe him.

‘I Can Say Many Nice Things,’ the second story, also centres on disbelief. Fleming, a teacher on a cruise ship with his students, is scheduled to workshop their short stories. Marcus lets us in on the way workshops operate, and the kind of “types” that tend to attend them. Since he teaches creative writing at Columbia University, he provides workshop descriptions with authority and clarity. However, even this story, as many others in this collection, hinges on sexual insecurity; plus, it echoes the malady of self-reflexive lyricism that makes the writing more insular as the stories progress.

Among the highlights are ‘My Views on the Darkness,’ a story told as an interview, about and by a person who lives in an underground walled-off space. ‘The Loyalty Protocol’ shines as well, with its apocalyptic, dystopian themes, even though they are not fully exploited by the author. But the best story has to be ‘The Father Costume,’ a gorgeous narrative in which fabric takes the shape of concepts, things, and even people. This story is the most evocative of Marcus’s brilliant novel, Notable American Women, in which he created a new kind of narrative for a new kind of story. It is obvious he is comfortable creating these language-scapes, because here the tentative pauses and the self-absorbed narration disappear. Instead, there is an earnest quest, and the quest is enough to consume the writer, the character, and the reader. Here’s a sample:

“I wish I could say my father’s name. I do not know the grammatical tense that could properly remark on my father. There is a portion of time that my own language cannot reach. A limitation, probably, in my mouth. In this portion of time is where my father is hidden. If I learn a new language, my father might come true. If I reach deep into my mouth and scoop out a larger cave. If I make do with less of myself, so that he might be more.”

Marcus displays precision in this story that is missing from the more traditional narratives in this collection. Weaknesses in wordplay are obvious in descriptive instances in ‘Rollingwood,’ such as extra phrases in the first paragraph.

However, this is one of the two or three stories that stand out because it does not hinge on the act (or the lack thereof) of sex. This story is about a father and his ill son, and despite its linguistic weaknesses the despair built over several pages brings enough payoff.

In many ways, Marcus reminds of the recently passed genius, David Foster Wallace. The eclectic gathering of narrative styles in Leaving the Sea, especially, invokes Wallace’s wonderful and flawless collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. But Marcus does not yet have the dexterity to handle multiple styles, or balance interiority and characters’ engagement with their world. Those are the tricks of genius Marcus does not yet have up his sleeve. Where Wallace was able to pick the right voice, tone, and modulation of self-reflexivity in Brief Interviews, Marcus falls short in his attempts. This makes for a disjointed collection of mostly flawed though ambitious stories.

If the function of stories is to change the reader, as some fiction teachers will say, then Leaving the Sea is a fantastic collection — provided a reader has enough patience to dig a few layers beneath the surface. If, however, entertainment is also a requirement, then this collection is not the book to pick up. It offers few of the pleasures that a David Foster Wallace or a Lydia Davis collection might, even though it is intellectually just as charged.

The reviewer teaches rhetoric at LUMS

Leaving the Sea

(SHORT STORIES)

By Ben Marcus

Knopf, New York

ISBN 978-0307379382

288pp.