Ben Marcus’ “Cold Little Bird"

photo of Ben Marcus          

There is a moment in Ben Marcus’ recent New Yorker short story, “Cold Little Bird," when the parents Rachel and Martin take their precocious10 year old, Jonah, to a therapist after he is caught reading a book, Lies, whose typeface, “glazed in blood,” describes how “the Jews” according to Jonah “caused 9/11 and they all stayed home that day so they wouldn’t get killed.” Jonah had already been acting strangely and in particular “angry, depressed, anxious, remote, bizarre…a Jew-hating Jewish child who might very well be dead inside.”  He refuses to hug them. ”What you are upset about, in relation to your son, may not fall under the purview of medicine, though” the therapist concludes. “To be honest, I was on the fence about medication. Whatever is going on with Jonah, it does not present as depression. In my opinion Jonah does not have a medical condition.” The scene recalls a theme Marcus developed in an earlier story, “The Dark Arts,” about an elusive illness the main character is suffering from and in turn The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice which both deal with a spiritual malady camouflaged by medical symptoms. Jonah is a wonderful creation, an example of the child as the vehicle for the unspoken inner life of his parents. While Martin claims to be proud of his identity, he and his wife are, in effect, the typical assimilated couple. “Last month was Yom Kippur and you didn’t fast. You didn’t go to services. You don’t ever say Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah,” Jonah says accusatorily. And talk about lack of emotion or emptiness here is a description of the mechanical sex that Jonah’s parents employ to comfort each other. “They used a cream. They used their hands. They used an object or two. During the brief strain of actual fornication they persisted with casual conversation about the next day’s errands.” Is it surprising that this child doesn’t like being touched? Like father, like son, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. All the old homilies apply. What’s really upsetting about Jonah as a character is ultimately how loyal he is to his parents and their values. It’s a little like the curse on the House of Atreus in the Oresteia. If you remember, the mother of the troubled child in The Bad Seed finds out, in the course of the drama, that her real mother was a serial killer.

Ben Marcus’ s "The Dark Arts"

Dusseldorf

There is a brilliant moment in Ben Marcus New Yorker short story, “The Dark Arts,”  ( The New Yorker, May 20, 2013). Julien the central character has come to Dusseldorf for treatment for a chronic and unspecified illness. He is staying in a hostel called the Millerhaus and waiting for his volatile girlfriend, Hayley who never seems to be coming. “He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was suppose to feel…Perhaps he had been fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick. Perhaps this was just what it felt like to be alive…Did everyone else, he wondered, feel listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared—you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did other people just clench their jaws and endure it, without running to the doctor, as he did, again and again?” Then an etiology is uncovered involving the suspicion of a brain tumor. “If you tell me it’s all in my head now...you won’t be lying,” Julien quips to his German doctor. The ambiguity remains, but one almost wishes that Marcus hadn’t opened up the possibility of the tumor explaining everything. In our culture there is a tendency to take a pill for every ache and then the pill taking goes on even when the ache fades since there’s the aftermath, the wake left by the injustice of the discomfiture itself. People have lost the ability to tell whether they are in physical or mere psychic pain and they’re no longer sure which pain they’re medicating when they seek out painkillers. Both Freud and Heidegger wrote about the word Unheimlichkeit and if you hit the hyperlink you’ll read how one very eloquent Australian blogger writes about the term. The word literally means “not feeling at home,” but refers to the sense of estrangement and dislocation that Freud called the “uncanny” and may be the fate of the wandering cosmopolitan individual, metrosexuals and the like, uprooted from tradition and victims of a pleasure principal that makes the absence of pleasure feel like pain. It’s also a condition that conducive to the making of art. Marcus’s character Julien fits the bill. Another way to put this is that Julien is a latter day Hans Castorp only his Zauberberg is Dusseldorf.

Hic Sum

photos: Paul Auster (Lotte Hansen), J.M Coetzee (Bert Nienhuis)

In his review of Here and Now, Letters 2008-2011, (New York Times Book Review, 3/16/13) Martin Riker remarks, “Arriving at the end of the print-letter tradition, Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee’s collected correspondence, ‘Here and Now,’ is all about new beginnings.” Whether these letters will compete with Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, James Agee and Father Flye and a host of other literary and historic figures who have thrived in the epistolary form, only time will tell. But one thing's obvious from the pictures of the two writers that accompany the review. They are the last of a generation of writers that modeled their publicity photos on the great writers and creations of the past. Lotte Hansen’s photo of Auster’s makes him look like Mr. Kurtz after he saw the Heart of Darkness.  Bert Nienhuis photo of Coetzee is more stoic; he looks a little like Conrad himself, set against a background of civilized vegetation. The self presentation of most writers today is more veiled by the ironies that their own works offer. Sam Lipsyte, George Saunders, and the Bens, Lerner and Marcus, don’t look this way. You might say that our post-modernist generation suffers from an anxiety of the anxiety of influence in which they discountenance a form of photograph that makes them look like they are this year’s contribution to the canon. One can love Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but one wouldn’t wish O’Neill’s existence on one’s worst enemy.

What Have You Done?

The ending of Ben Marcus’s “What Have You Done?” (The New Yorker, 8/8/11) unveils the source of the eviscerating humor of the story like a headstone that is unveiled at a gravesite long after the burial. The story is an inadvertent essay on the power of endings because the ending eradicates everything that precedes it. By the time you finish reading about the central character Paul’s past as he returns home to Cleveland for the Berger family reunion with his mom, dad, sister Alicia and brother-in-law Rick, all that matters is the future. Even if the knockout ending in which Paul’s problem is revealed, i.e., that no one believes anything he says and that there is no way to make them believe it, destroys the hilarity leading up to it, it’s still damned funny along the way.  The experience of reading the story is somewhat akin to not remembering the great time you’ve had at party after you’ve vomited all over yourself and blacked out. Describing Alicia and Rick, Marcus writes, “Alicia and Rick had their whole married lives to exchange fluids and language, but for some reason they’d needed to wait until Paul was there to demonstrate how clandestine and porno they were.” Left alone with her son, Paul’s mother experiences “the panic of someone trapped in a cage with an animal.” Brother-in-law Rick’s nonchalant line “How’s business, Paul?” elicits from Paul the thought that “these questions were just a gateway for nonsexual statistical intercourse between underachieving men.”