Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

Book Review by Galen O'Hanlon | 01 May 2014
Book title: Leaving the Sea
Author: Ben Marcus

The human condition is too grand and vague, so Ben Marcus writes about the human disease instead. Many of the characters in these short stories are sick, or at least they inhabit oversized, overweight bodies that don’t do the job of hiding the fact that life is going to end soon. Someone suggests that we ‘try to think outside of our disease,’ but it’s not the physical decay we need to think outside of, it's the urge to hide it and repeat the ubiquitous human fantasies of longevity.

The prose is lethal, dissecting, surprising, oblique. Early on there’s an intolerable couple, keen to show that they are ‘vibrantly glistening sexual human beings, even in their late thirties, when most people’s genitals turn dark and small, like shrunken heads.’ The stories progress from this relatively familiar version of reality to ones where nothing is explained, the anchoring details are cut out and the kill hole is as easily referred to as the kitchen. The Kafkaesque corporate glacier looms large too, with the sort of disinterested menace that makes easy victims of emotionally helpless men. This is writing that pushes to the edge, where it’s bleak and awful and darkly funny. [Galen O'Hanlon]

 

Out now, published by Alfred A. Knopf, RRP £16.99