“If we ever need to know what will go away, we need only to look at a person. Just by being in the room with her, I was foreshadowing our separation,” a character observes. “In truth, every man’s body is an announcement of a future disappearance. Likewise, the revelation that all relationships end is a pretty basic one, but the Cartesian filter through which Mr. Several of the later stories reveal narrative arcs in a way that feels almost accidental, because it is so easy to get caught up in what could pass for a glossary of the uncanny: “In America the head sprouts either soft or coarse hair, features small apologies called eyes, and has a round mistake tunnel known as a mouth.”Įach story is shot through with anxiety, especially of the sexual variety, but also about aging, the future, maturation, alienation, family and the vagaries of illness.The old irony of alienation-wondering whether everyone else feels it, too-has been expressed by everyone from Thoreau to Tears for Fears.

Marcus is at his best when this poetic instinct for language converges with his steady and sharp sense of plotting. A description of another character is perhaps one of the best failed tautologies in recent memory: “He thought of himself as deeply empathic-if mainly toward himself.” “In some sense, my feelings towards my wife and children are more intense when the moment is not complicated by their presence,” offers the man who plans to bury himself underground. He is marvelous on the level of the sentence and in his depiction of flawed human logic. Marcus writes, in the title story, one six-page sentence that encompasses the entire downward spiral of middle age in its endless betrayals: parents’ aging, children’s demands, a marriage dissolving, a body and eventually a whole being that become uncooperative and unknowable.ĭespite this melancholy, Mr. Several stories later in the book are accounts of what might be called post-humans, trying to wrap words around the experience of love and the despair at its loss, in a world in which the necessary language has atrophied. Marcus writes two short, clinical dialogues with leaders of imagined extremisms: One believes that adulthood is a harmful construct to be counteracted by “re-childing” the other that the best course of action during an apocalyptic event is to bury oneself, completely isolated, in an underground cavity. In the second of the book’s six sections, Mr. As the collection moves forward, the work grows more dystopian and experimental. The stories in Leaving the Sea range considerably in style, starting with fairly straightforward, conventionally paced narratives: a creative-writing professor considering an affair with a student, for instance, or a onetime pariah returning to his hometown after many years away. Marcus is the tension between the two halves of the phrase “black comedy,” rather than its effects.

Leaving the sea by ben marcus