Leaving the Sea, 15 new stories by Ben Marcus

The adjective surreal has, over time, come to mean unfathomable or not of this world or just really, really freaky. But its worth noting that the early surrealist writers werent interested in summoning strangeness for strangenesss sake. Their goal was rather to discomfit readers in the way that our most vivid dreams do, through the juxtaposition of realistic yet unrelated images: two realities, more or less distant, brought together, in the words of poet Pierre Reverdy.

The best stories in Ben Marcuss new collection of short fiction, Leaving the Sea, are surreal in this original sense of the word. They seem powered by the electrostatic charge that results whenever the texture of the familiar is abraded by some alien, highly resistant material. These 15 tales are by turns tender, funny, heartbreaking, frightening and occasionally overweening. But even when hes overestimating his readers patience or fortitude, Marcus is nothing less than fully engaged in an artistic enterprise that the surrealists would have authorized: injecting into our recognizable world just enough weirdness to make readers second-guess their senses.

(Knopf) - Leaving the Sea, by Ben Marcus

Snow wreaks havoc across the South, Syrian army nears Aleppo, rare white lion born in Poland, and more.

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This destabilizing weirdness starts off subtly in the opening story, What Have You Done? So invested are we in tracking the shaky progress of an ill-tempered man who has reluctantly returned home for a family reunion that it almost slips right by us when he pauses to regard the newest architectural additions to the downtown Cleveland skyline: They were tall and thin and black, hooked at their tops, and were either sheathed entirely in charcoal-tinted glass or simply windowless.

Even those who dont think to scribble a question mark in the margin after reading that sentence may wonder whether theres some sort of connection between those hellish, hook-topped skyscrapers and the middle-of-the-night knock at the door that resonates throughout the next story. I Can Say Many Nice Things begins as wry, spot-on satire. Its setting is a creative-writing seminar offered to (hilariously untalented) cruise-ship passengers as an edifying onboard activity. But mid-story, a crew member begins barging in on sleeping passengers to check them against the ships manifest, without explaining why. After this point, Marcuss straightforward narrative sensibility begins tacking toward the mysterious Don DeLillo Islands, where paranoia reigns supreme and light humor goes to harden.

If these details sound more at home in dystopian sci-fi than in a pair of otherwise naturalistic short stories set in present-day Cleveland and aboard a tacky cruise ship, theyre only the first of many such dissonant chords Marcus strikes. Indeed, as we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if were moving gradually through a dark chronology of Americas imminent social and political unraveling. And though theres nothing to indicate that these texts are linked schematically, its hard not to register them as creepy snapshots from some pre-apocalyptic Instagram feed.

By the time we reach the books midpoint, the seeds of dread that Marcus has planted early on have blossomed into full-blown fleurs du mal. Weve encountered the sad-sack protagonist of Rollingwood, whose string of personal misfortunes is so devastatingly complete that it almost suggests a memo has gone out to his ex-girlfriend, his boss, the people in his carpool, even his sickly child, declaring him anathema. And weve had time to process the pair of brief Q&A-style interviews with two highly educated, supremely self-satisfied sociopaths who justify their withdrawal from humanity by quoting radical social theorists and couching their monstrousness in magazine-ready pull-quotes. (To me its beautiful that our survival strategies are wonderfully diverse and not all of us can succeed.)

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Leaving the Sea, 15 new stories by Ben Marcus