Notes from the fog

Ben Marcus

Granta, £12.99

On one of Ida’s visits to her mother’s retirement home, the older woman relates how her own father never carried out his threats of abandoning his family, instead staying at home and, suitably medicated, gradually withdrawing from them. “But his distance from us, emotionally, became less threatening.”

It’s a very representative moment from this new collection of short stories by acclaimed New York author Marcus, in which detachment is initially feared before becoming an ingrained habit and then a way of life that feels impossible to change.

Alienation, though. It’s so last century. Why should we spend time on an author who so relentlessly populates his stories with characters who react to the deaths of family members with indifference, dull their senses with tranquillisers, hug their children without feeling and for whom even the desperate life-affirming sex following bereavement is perfunctory?

Well, for a start, they’re not all like that. Some are frightened enough of isolation that they’ll risk pain and humiliation to connect with another human being. Also, Marcus keeps on finding things to say from this perspective. It’s what enables him to write stories like the chilling and extraordinary opener “Cold Bird”, in which ten-year-old Jonah announces to his parents that he doesn’t want them to hug and kiss him any more. Jonah doesn’t show any signs of withdrawing from the world, just his parents, and he states his case with a logic and articulacy they find hard to cope with in a boy his age. What interests Marcus here is not the calm and impassive Jonah but the contrasting ways his mother and father consequently fall to pieces, each according to their deepest fears and concerns.

When Marcus pulls back to show the context in which these dramas are being played out, the backdrops are usually dystopian, but painfully hip, corporate environments, like Ida’s think tank “where the future was getting fondled”, or the Mayflower company, which comes up with the idea of scrapping food and having people absorb nutrients from light, or the firm that makes mood-altering chemicals with a view to claiming said moods as their intellectual property. Or he shows us Helen and Roy, another estranged couple, running an architectural design company in a near-future when terrorist bombings are so commonplace they have to continually brainstorm about death to keep up with the demand for innovative civic monuments to the victims.

Although the overall tone is dark, this collection is quite varied. “The Trees of Sawtooth Park” could be adapted for Black Mirror, while “A Suicide of Trees” concocts a bizarre, almost surreal mystery. A story that reads like a glimpse into the mind of a serial killer is followed by an ultimately touching tale about an old couple who have learnt all they will ever know about each other. The fable-like “Critique” even riffs on Borges.

Admittedly, this book can be wearing. There are 13 stories in this collection, but read straight through it feels like a lot more. It’s a good idea to intersperse them with lighter fare, to avoid burnout, and to do full justice to Marcus’s talents.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT