The Flame Alphabet [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Ben Marcus (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 17, 2012

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.
 
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
 
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.
 
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012: From the dark, curious imagination of Ben Marcus comes another brain melter of a novel. The Flame Alphabet has a pandemic premise--children are slowly killing their parents by speaking--and only gets stranger and smarter from there. When Sam leaves his decaying family behind to seek a cure for his daughter’s lethal condition, he winds up in a government think tank that casually eliminates human subjects in its quest for an antidote. Stories don’t get much more horrifying than this, but Marcus’s absorbing, conversational style makes his twisted bildungsroman as difficult to put down as it is to accept. In an unimaginable situation, Sam takes the only steps that seem possible: He submits, he works, he dreams of his wife and child. This cruel, insightful meditation on societal dysfunction and individual resilience comes from a mind that must be appreciated, even if you find yourself relieved that it’s not your own. --Mia Lipman

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Featured Guest Review: Jonathan Lethem on The Flame Alphabet

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels, including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn and two short story collections, and he has edited and contributed to several anthologies. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's, and many other periodicals. His latest book of essays, The Ecstacy of Influence, explores the role of writers in contemporary culture.

Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language. We already knew this, from the outrageous stories, and from Notable American Women. When I call him an "inventor," I'm seeking a little working distance from the bland (and often dismissive) term "experimental"--for if Marcus is conducting experiments, he's conducting them out of view, and then unveiling the results as a fait accompli, like an Edison or Tesla or some other secular magician emerging from a laboratory. Marcus's work, with its powerful kinship to the visual arts and music and perhaps even pharmacology, should less be copyrighted than patented. His devices can enchant and wreck your mind. Like I say, we already knew this.

What we didn't know, and I suppose possibly he didn't either until he blew the wrought-iron clawfeet off his own prototype and replaced them with white-walls and a souped-up engine, is how thrilling it would be to see Marcus apply his gifts to something closer to traditional narrative. I say that as if it's some drab operation ("apply" and "traditional") but in fact what The Flame Alphabet has done is open up a kind of wide-screen view of the sort of crazy Ben Marcus movie that was likely always playing in his brain but which he has now taken out for wide release.

It appears that all the giddy anxiety and sorrowful vertigo of Marcus's language was only the leading edge of an implicit sense of pure story, the kind where figures in a landscape struggle to negotiate outrageous danger, loss and mystery. The book is an urban ironist's reply to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, yet in a way I think it is braver and more wrenching even than McCarthy's book (as well as, as you'd expect, more peculiar and funny, and less infused with wearisome machismo) because of the greater degree of complicity it admits, complicity with the disasters that flow through our collective world but are also locatable in each and every one of us if we're ready to meet them there.

The Flame Alphabet explodes with human drama without for one single line relinquishing Marcus's lifelong commitment to the drama of a sentence making itself known on the page. In fact, and this is surely the most brilliant thing about the book, it fuses those two notions of drama into one immutable and bizarre whole. That's what's known in show business as a spoiler, but I couldn't resist.

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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Teenagers can be described as toxic, no doubt about it. But in Marcus’ speculative tale, teens are literally poisoning their parents each time they speak. This ingenious and provoking premise enables the boldly imaginative Marcus (Notable American Women, 2001), recipient of a remarkable array of major literary awards, to explore the paradoxes of family and how the need to communicate can go utterly wrong. As this confounding, heartrending plague spreads from Jewish families to the general population, gravely ill adults flee; teens, who take to terrorizing adults with megaphones, are quarantined; and society breaks down. Claire and Sam, the ailing parents of virulently weaponized Esther, belong to a secret sect of “forest Judaism,” which involves listening to mysterious transmissions emitted from the earth. Their tiny, sylvan synagogue becomes the focus of an aggressive stranger, who directs a grim work camp hastily assembled to find a cure for this catastrophic affliction at any cost. Marcus conducts a febrile and erudite inquiry into “the threat of language,” offering incandescent insights into ancient alphabets and mysticism, ostracism and exodus, incarceration with Holocaust echoes, and Kafkaesque behavioral science. Ultimately, the suspenseful, if excessively procedural, apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus’ blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (January 17, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780307379375
• ISBN-13: 978-0307379375
• ASIN: 030737937X
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (80 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #320,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ben Marcus is the author of The Flame Alphabet, Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. A new collection of his short stories, Leaving the Sea, will be published by Knopf in January, 2014. Marcus has published short stories in Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, Granta, The Believer, McSweeney's, Conjunctions, and Tin House. He is editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and the fiction editor of The American Reader. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, the Berlin Prize, and awards from Creative Capital and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 2000 he has been on the faculty at Columbia University.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 85 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Shush January 31, 2012

By Penguin

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

After finishing "Notable American Women" I though Ben Marcus might be a genius. Then I read "What Have you Done," a trite little story in "The New Yorker," and was convinced (this is true) there was someone else named "Ben Marcus." I just finished "The Flame Alphabet" today, and am so sad to see how far in the wrong direction his prose has gone (unless, of course, this novel was written by a third Ben Marcus). If you've watched that crummy promotional video with the earnest voiceover on Amazon's main page for this book, well, that's exactly how this novel reads. And it's weird, because the subject matter (language is toxic, etc.) would allow for a marvelous display of "Marcusian" prose, with all its claustrophobic tropes, its fascination with silent confinement, its lovely archaic technologies (which here become gimmicky installation art pieces), its vanishing whispers, and so on. However, silence and the limit of intelligibility are not materials of this book. They are just its topics. Instead of the formal exploration of these issues, we get a boring "thriller" (I guess), a battle between a predictably many-faced villain, and an obviously flawed anti-hero. This is a plot-driven book written by someone who doesn't seem to understand plot (oh, all those pointless repetitions; all those unjustified jumps back and forth in time; that malformed last section!). The funny thing is that in the past Marcus never needed this conventional idea of plot to write beautiful fiction. "Plot," by the way, is a quick, sloppy and almost pointless term (but I deeply distrust those who attack it in the name of "experimental fiction"--and distrust the latter label even more) that here stands for something like "a suspenseful story divided into acts." And I would also like to quickly clarify the following: this is the wrong kind of "boring." It's not the interesting sort, which makes us experience the density of time or struggle with the opacity of language. It's just the boring kind of boring.

Despite creating a silent world, Ben Marcus never really explores silence, or how to *write* silence (like, for instance, Beckett does--by the way, the hero is called Sam, and one of the villain's names is Murphy, a notorious wire and string aficionado), or how to make sense of senselessness, or what writing in a graphophobic world would be like. Instead, for instance, Marcus chooses to create a deus ex machina: a serum that allows characters to momentarily tolerate speech (for an hour or so), so that they can have dialogues that will further the "plot" (cf. supra). This, needless to say, goes against the entire premise and the whole point of the book: why devise this lethal linguistic pest if you are then just going to make exceptions at will--just because it's convenient--and let characters speak? It should also be noted that after months of verbal abstinence, once they regain their tolerance for speech these characters only use it to exchange snarky wisecracks.

Ben Marcus doesn't trust language. But not in the way he (I imagine) would hope this is meant. A quick example. The novel is littered with moments like these: "I f-ing *rejoiced*"; "that doesn't even f-ing *concern* you"; "maybe LeBov didn't even f-ing *know*." Lots of f-ings [Amazon's modesty won't let me spell out the entire word] followed by italics, as if neither of them (the adverb or the italicized word) could, on its own, convey the intended emphasis. This may sound like a quibble, but it is relevant in the general context of a novel that has to do with verbal austerity, the importance of making each word count, and the saturation of meaning.

Somehow, it seems petty to get into the basic inconsistencies of the plot (language and pictograms are lethal but photographs, which play a huge role in the book, are ok? Then how hard could it be to communicate using photos? A long, long etcetera follows), but one does have the sense of being constantly cheated throughout the book.

Oh, I almost forgot: there is a whole exhausting and bombastic subplot about Jewish mysticism.

I don't even know why I'm writing all this. I'm just so depressed and disappointed...

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Insightful analogy or fever dream? January 5, 2012

By K. Sullivan VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

A devastating illness sweeps the land. Speech has become toxic. It seems to have started with Jews but it spreads to all others. Only children are immune. Words are a disease to the body, a pollutant to the environment - leaving behind an accumulating salty waste. As the toxin evolves, it's no longer limited to speech, but extends to writing and gestures as well. All forms of communication are noxious, lethal. Adults are wasting away. Without initially comprehending the consequences (only later is speech consciously used as a force of terror), children keep talking, their words physically debilitating adults even in the rare instances when their meaning is not acrimonious. Eventually, children are abandoned to makeshift quarantines - communities from which all adults have fled. The adults are whisked away to a research facility. There the survivors attempt to devise a new safe method of communication.

Samuel (Sam) is the reader's window into the experience. He's a middle-aged Jew, married to Claire. Together they have a fourteen-year-old daughter, Esther. Classifying Sam as a Jew shouldn't normally be necessary. Here, however, it's essential to the story. Sam's brand of Judaism is "reconstructionist" focusing on a "covert method of devotion" complete with very peculiar worship practices and tools. No effort is made to explain or rationalize this strange faith, but it's pivotal to the story. This in no small way contributes to the surreal unsettled nature of the book.

The author portrays the symptoms and effects of the illness in vivid detail. Significant portions of the narrative recount in disgusting detail the putrefaction of the adults' bodies. One doesn't suspect the author of being exploitative, but rather overly morbid. This quality reaches well past the symptoms of the illness, however. The author's representation of marital intimacy and familial relationships is starkly unromantic. There is a base, almost abhorrent or dirty, quality to sexual relations. More broadly, the body itself or flesh is depicted in a repugnant way. Family interactions are necessarily dysfunctional, strained and painful - even before speech became physically harmful. The narrator posits that fatherhood is just another word for failure (or "something done badly"). In another instance, a father only recognizes his daughter with certainty when she regards him with expressions of disgust or contempt.

Sam is something of a miserable, wretched character, and, as witnessed through his perspective, the rest of his family is as well. Reminiscing about birthday parties, Sam's focus is on unsupervised babies ravaging his house, parents stinking up his bathroom, and everyone making a mess on his rugs. Esther is an ungrateful, resentful child. She coldly requests money and privacy for her birthday. She argues that all fond memories are romanticized fabrications. She likens being called "sweetie" to being vomited upon and can't abide niceties. This antipathy is not one way. Despite the existence of some fundamental family loyalty, they are a veritable resentment triangle, each harshly judging the motivations of the others. Such pervasive negativity leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the reader. There's also something perverse in this stereotypical portrayal of the Jew with a martyr's complex (as personified in Sam but also highlighted in one of the strange Jewish sermons exhorting followers to "take blame for affliction").

Apart from the unpleasant negativity, the story's disparate elements never gel into a cohesive whole. Part 3 provides no resolution to the story, just appended anecdotes. Sections of the novel falter over internal inconsistencies and improbabilities (particularly part 2). There was also a disjointed quality to the text (e.g., repetition, subtle changes in voice). One assumes there must be some insightful analogy veiled in the "demon speech" and the strange Jewish faith, but is there? Or could this be just some surreal fever dream? "The Flame Alphabet" is an ideal candidate for praise like "daring" and "mind-bending" or "sanely insane" (what?) - incomprehensible yet implying profundity. Criticism is easily and inevitably dismissed as resulting from ignorance or misunderstanding. Those who don't appreciate it just don't get it. Any fault lies in the reader.

I had no desire to finish the book. Actually completing it provided no reward for the effort. My advice, approach cautiously. My earnest wish, good luck.

40 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Flame Alphabet December 23, 2011

By Brendan Moody VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

At first glance, Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet, in which speech itself is the cause of an debilitating and ultimately fatal illness that causes the collapse of society, would seem to be a post-apocalyptic novel of an unusual kind. It is that, but it's also something more, as one realizes when the narrator reveals that he is an adherent of a bizarre (and completely fictitious) form of Judaism that involves solitary, secretive worship at isolated synagogue huts to which radio sermons are transmitted, sermons that are to be heard in silence and never discussed, not even with others listening to them at the same time. The disturbing strangeness of these practices, and of the way the language virus is described, make the novel as much a work of surrealism as a post-apocalyptic fiction. That surreal atmosphere does not, however, rule out moments of skillful psychological realism, with which Marcus captures the desperate desire of his characters to maintain the rituals of daily life even as the simplest communication becomes dangerous.

The language problem begins with children, whose words are all of a sudden physically painful. There's an obvious metaphor here for the pangs of child-rearing, and to some extent Marcus makes use of it. Narrator Samuel's daughter Esther was a hostile, unsentimental teenager whose relentlessly analytical rejection hurt her parents even before every word became a literal infection, and their arguments are recognizable without becoming trite or tedious. But as a metaphor and only a metaphor, the language virus would be unrealistic and hollow; instead, it has real bite. Samuel's wife Claire gets sicker and sicker, like a terminally ill patient waiting to die, and his efforts to take care of her and to stay in communication with their poisonous daughter are both touching and upsetting. (The attempt to throw Esther a birthday party, in a broken world with no neighbors, no presents, and almost no food, is a tour de force.) However odd the concept, this is a real post-apocalyptic novel, with a pessimistic bent.

Eventually Samuel finds himself in a sort of research center where survivors are trying to find a form of communication that won't sicken them. (By this point the written word and body language are as infectious as speech.) The methods by which they work around their inability to interact, even creating a sort of culture, reveal something about human ingenuity, and also about the vitality that participation in a community provides: without language, the people at the center are intellectually, emotionally, even physically reduced. Like many contemporary novelists, Ben Marcus is aware of the postmodern vogue for declaring communication impossible, or at least incredibly complicated. His invented form of Judaism, with its emphasis on mystic truth as something private that can't and shouldn't be shared, reflects similar ideas in certain religious traditions. Without denying the existence of failures of communication (even before things fell apart, Samuel wasn't good at dealing with his family), Marcus shows how important it is, imagining a world in which its impossibility is literal rather than an academic concept. Meaning may be an illusion, but it's a necessary one, and mystery, like the questions surrounding the man or men named Murphy or LeBov who keep(s) crossing paths with Samuel... well, mystery is overrated. A little of it in a basically orderly society is one thing, but when it's the only constant, life is little better than a nightmare.

In time there's an important discovery at the research center that gives the commentary on our drive for community a darker edge, but like many literary post-apocalyptic novels this book is less about its plot than about the evocation of its grim world and the insights into our society that the difference provides. And this certainly is a novel of eerie and powerful images: parents hiding in concealed rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of a child with whom they can no longer interact; television programs silenced and the actors' face digitally smeared so audiences can stand to look at them; a desperate effort to receive a radio signal by sending it through the mouth-- desperate, and impossibly successful. Running through all these images, of course, is the need for input, for something to take in and respond to and wrap your life around. It's understanding the importance of that need, and reflecting it through a fantastic yet profoundly human conceit, that makes The Flame Alphabet such a sharp, dark, and moving novel.