Some preliminary thoughts on Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet: (twenty pages in, but never too soon to make a prejudiced, half-baked, ill-considered judgment of what may well be a fucking awesome novel.)
Start with that adverbial adjective: "insanely sane". What does it even mean? What qualities in the world begin dully as sane ones, and are then somehow animated by being insanely so? The word "sane" can be used as a compliment or a pejorative; in the former case, "insanely" can only water sanity down, and in the latter, heighten its pejorative effect. "Insanely sane" is no handsome tuple of complicity. It speaks, if at all, of writerly weariness.
Then we have all the egregious name dropping, the roll calling. I imagine Chabon, taken somewhat by his late sleepless and febrile night, setting out to write the sentence, realizing that he'd have to bring an original name to the otherwise predictable list, crossing out, say, Pynchon from the list of Possible Brilliant Writers, hitting on David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive he'd had the pleasure of only recently watching, patting himself on the back, then hitting on Robert Walser and Mary Shelley, and rewarding himself with a long day's rest. He'd earned it, after all.
And then there's that last sentence. If you forget for a moment the cliched and almost certainly untrue and in any case irrelevant image of Chabon's staying up till late to finish this novel---what is he, a fifty-something reading an airport bodice-ripper?----if you forget, and perhaps forgive this, what of: "[...] felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic." The classic? The only one? Maybe he meant "the classic", as in the archetypal classic. Or maybe he meant "the classic", as in "the exemplar of its kind"; this is classic Realism; this is classic primate behavior; this is classic Mitt. Whatever it's meaning, never has a piece of prose so transparently in thrall to its audience been so transparently opaque. It's blurb writing at its worst; or, (if you're in an uncharitable mood), classic Chabon.
1) Not another goddamn story about Jewish identity! Enough already! We've heard from you guys. We fucking keep hearing from you guys. Why not (for a change) stop being selfconscious about your historicality, or lack thereof, and make a sincere bid for ahistoricality? Huh?
2) The novel's main selling point is also its conceit (surprise, surprise): Far into the future, or perhaps right now in an alternate reality, adults are getting sick; they're dying off. The culprit appears to be language, or, more specifically, language as spoken by children; children who, at least initially, are unwitting about the havoc they wreak on their unsuspecting progenitors. I haven't read enough of the novel to see what Marcus makes of this premise, but I foresee some purely technical problems.
First of all: the good anti-utopian novel usually comes with a lot of politio-socio-cultural baggage, which it must (at least initially) conceal, and which sloughs off gradually, revealing itself for what it is: a contentious and polemical little parasite hosted by an otherwise lovable story. In such novels, the hook is the plot; the social commentary is just along for the ride, and by the time you notice it's there, it's too late: you find out the Amazon Used Book seller from whom you bought the book has a shitty return policy.
Marcus is having none of this. He's brandishing his symbolic sword---with which he will no doubt cut a swath through the modern novel, or at least corrupt and dated conceptions of it---he's brandishing that sexy katana in the plain light of day. He's using that little beast to slice plotwise through the novel. And he's letting you catch him in the act. Is this calculated, a bit of the notorious Marcus swagger? Or is it just him saying: "Wait till you hear the idea for my new novel. It's just like Contagion, except---drum roll...---the disease is language! Language, do you see, Heidi! It's brilliant!"
The second problem is obvious: Isn't it ironic that a novel about the death of language, or, equivalently, the massacring of people by language, can only be communicated through language? Isn't there something unseemly about this irony? I'm sure Marcus is aware of this, and I'm sure there's some phenomenally brilliant cultural studies point to be made about exactly such a dichotomy, but I'm not sure if it belongs in this, or indeed, any novel.
Third, an aesthetic consideration. There's something brain-fartesque about having to read pleonasms, especially bombastic ones. I will not list any of Marcus's here, but suffice it to say that the bodily degeneration Marcus needs to describe to describe the disease of language is affecting enough without having to resort to comma-separated lists each of whose adjectives neighbors the last in meaning as well as sound.
3) The back cover lists praise for the novel by J. Safran Foer (the author, and lately the auteur, of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), by Tom McCarthy (of C fame) and Michael Chabon. What that last man had to say about The Flame Alphabet is interesting for its own sake:
Echoes of Ballard's insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka's terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes---I mean our world---out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic.
Start with that adverbial adjective: "insanely sane". What does it even mean? What qualities in the world begin dully as sane ones, and are then somehow animated by being insanely so? The word "sane" can be used as a compliment or a pejorative; in the former case, "insanely" can only water sanity down, and in the latter, heighten its pejorative effect. "Insanely sane" is no handsome tuple of complicity. It speaks, if at all, of writerly weariness.
Then we have all the egregious name dropping, the roll calling. I imagine Chabon, taken somewhat by his late sleepless and febrile night, setting out to write the sentence, realizing that he'd have to bring an original name to the otherwise predictable list, crossing out, say, Pynchon from the list of Possible Brilliant Writers, hitting on David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive he'd had the pleasure of only recently watching, patting himself on the back, then hitting on Robert Walser and Mary Shelley, and rewarding himself with a long day's rest. He'd earned it, after all.
And then there's that last sentence. If you forget for a moment the cliched and almost certainly untrue and in any case irrelevant image of Chabon's staying up till late to finish this novel---what is he, a fifty-something reading an airport bodice-ripper?----if you forget, and perhaps forgive this, what of: "[...] felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic." The classic? The only one? Maybe he meant "the classic", as in the archetypal classic. Or maybe he meant "the classic", as in "the exemplar of its kind"; this is classic Realism; this is classic primate behavior; this is classic Mitt. Whatever it's meaning, never has a piece of prose so transparently in thrall to its audience been so transparently opaque. It's blurb writing at its worst; or, (if you're in an uncharitable mood), classic Chabon.
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