Ben Marcus is so hot right now. With reviews and interviews in New York Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Wired, The Millions, Salon,Bookforum, HTMLGiant, and Publisher’s Weekly, it’s hard not to describe the publication of The Flame Alphabet as a very big deal. While many of the reviews remark on how the book's linear narrative is a departure from Marcus’ other, “more difficult” books, the central conflict—that the speech of children is somehow killing off adults—is anything but conventional. And since our theme this month is "Relative Perversions," I’d like to offer up the top five perversions at play that, regardless of "linear" or "difficult," make the book so compelling.  

5. Perverse Fear. The lethal-language-of-kids notion is, somehow, very correct. How could the young not be the end of us? Like any good virus, the disease mutates, becomes a more efficient killing machine by transforming all language into a vector of fatal harm. The questions raised by such an attack are both entirely personal and too enormous to digest. What effects do our words have on other people? Is there a way of speaking without causing harm? How could the world function without language?

4. Perverse Perseverance. So. Any and all language is killing your wife and causing your own very rapid deterioration. What’s a father to do? Work. Feverish, futile work. The father’s determination to keep his family together is the force driving the whole novel. Here is the activity of Beckett (“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”) and the activity we all desperately cling to while our lives swarm uncontrollably on. Wait, what? I don’t think I know what I’m saying, but I like thinking about it.

3. The Perversion of Failure. The Flame Alphabet is rich with objects that are somehow both textually vivid and kind of impossible to imagine. As a reader, this is to experience the perverse failure of language first-hand. These objects are alive, resonant...but I somehow can’t manage to see them. This is delightful. This is an effect that causes me to lean further in.

2. The Perversion of Belief. The Flame Alphabet also explores what happens when a man has to reconcile certain fundamental beliefs with an impossible new reality. Our protagonist is assailed by different authorities (scientists, doctors, rabbis) who make him question whether understanding is desirable, if even possible. This is my favorite kind of game. What usefulness does knowledge have? If an idea can be understood, is it lifeless?

1. Perverse Sexy Time. There are some adorable moments of catastrophically awkward sex: "To prove her vigor, Claire cornered me, sexually, made a physical trespass. Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on." I know not everyone’s into that kind of thing, but I find a certain charm in these descriptions of failed engagement: the private longing, the humiliation.

And hey, even if perversion isn't really your thing, you should probably read The Flame Alphabet in order to advance, sexually, with Columbia students, or to find out how this novel fits in with Marcus' obsession with men trapped in holes. One of the best things a book can do is provide the space and time and the tiny pushes your brain needs in order to proceed with curiosity. The Flame Alphabet does this astoundingly well.

Image: New York Magazine

A friend and I were preparing deviled eggs for a Superbowl party when I insisted on enhancing our deviled egg production with a few choice sentences from Diane Williams’ new story collection, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. How could I not—with the enthusiasm gathering in us of crushed yolks, globs of mayo, secret relish—pull my friend over to take a look at these sentences, these other small, new bursts of pleasure?

When I talk about Diane Williams, author of seven excellent short story collections and founding editor of the literary annual NOON, I tend to talk about her sentences more than I talk about her stories. Her sentences contain an awful lot, and when put together into a whole story, the entirety gives me too much to say in one sitting. Too much to say, and a fear of ruining the pleasurable effect the story’s just had by putting too many other words around it.

The other main thing as to why I talk about her sentences, is that her sentences are brilliant. Her sentences can be plucked from their stories and stand alone devastating people. 

So, in order to say a little, but not too much, and as an excuse to publish a list of some of my very favorite sentences from Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, I’d like to suggest a few methods by which pleasure can come about. First, the sentences:

“Another one of my boyfriends said helpfully there is a great difference between love, hatred, and desire, but nothing compels us to maintain these differences.”

From "Mood Which Gripped Me"

“The mother experiences her losses with positivity. She even frames the notion of her own charm as she heads into her normal amount of it.”

From "Chicken Winchell"

“Her fate was being rigged for the rough surface.”

From "Mrs. Keable’s Brothers"

“The suspense in that moment had drawn me in and I was fascinated to hear my answer to her that was delivered in a weepy form.”

From "Arm Under the Soil"

“I seriously did not think I was in the state I describe as reserved for me.”

From "Expectant Motherhood"

My friend, who was helping with the deviled eggs, and who is well on her way to becoming a doctor, confessed to feelings of inadequacy with regard to talking about very smart literary fiction. I say put the fear aside. The point of reading is not always to then get a hold of something, as if the story is some riddle. Allow for the simple, intense pleasure in the sound of the words. Let the sentence make you think in a way you had not before, with a logic to the syntax that is surprising and fresh, somehow both very true at the same time that it is utterly unfamiliar. Permit yourself to remain in a state of uncertainty and wonder.

Image: mcsweeneys.net

Several questions came to me while reading Garth Risk Hallberg’s Timesriff, "Why Write Novels At All?" And by "questions," I really mean "moments of skeptical irritation."

To Hallberg, “The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer ‘How should novels be?’ but ‘Why write novels at all?’.” He identifies Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and Jeffrey Eugenides as the new literary big guns, and then, from what I understand, asserts that the challenges these writers face are not so much questions of form or craft; the new shit to ponder and be judged by is how well the work manifests a sense of connectedness with other people.

Hallberg seems to be saying that these writers have eschewed an exploration of formal principles and standards that would separate themselves from "lower" forms of art. The challenge now, for the, like,super good top literary writers, is to run with this whole empathy thing, making sure not only to "delight" readers, but to "instruct" them as well. But simply because these writers have asked similar questions in and about their work doesn't mean they've ceased to concern themselves with matters of craft. Jonathan Franzen is deeply invested in the style and forms of domestic, realist fiction. David Foster Wallace was an enormous influence on bringing hyper-realism into mainstream culture. These writers have in no way ignored the questions involved in how novels should be.

Another issue I have is Hallberg’s identification of Franzen, Smith, Wallace and Eugenides as writers who are driving literary aesthetics. While these writers are the more literary on the top-seller lists, they are not working in a vacuum. There are other writers at work. Whole pockets of lesser known (even "experimental") writers have been playing with language and style in very serious, exciting, and different ways. They may be on the outer edge of well-known fiction, yet the very fact of their play with language and form pushes its boundaries all the same. To claim that the new "literary" standard is a warm gooey center of feeling surrounded by some sort of message is simply a mistake.

The other boner to be contended with, as far as I see it, is the underlying assumption that the hallmark of "special feelings of togetherness" has usurped formal considerations. Special feelings have always been at work in literary fiction. This whole "not being alone" moralist emotionality has always been at play, in conjunction with formal considerations. Not a dichotomy. Great literature has very special feelings! Great literature stirs very special feelings in the reader!

Screw the whole "message" nonsense (I’d need a whole other post to slog through that wad of sunshine), but feelings! And standards. My god, please, standards, rules, principles. Not everyone can get a gold star. The "age of the iPad" doesn’t change that.

Image: tullamorearts.com

I just dug up my copy of The Great Gatsby, full of my highlighting and marginalia from junior year. I can’t think of a friend who didn’t read it for American Lit in high school, and I’ve only met one person who didn't love its clarity and beauty. I looked at the dedication: “Once again to Zelda.” But the epigraph took me by surprise.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
—Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

Plenty of books have interesting epigraphs, as Kayla recently pointed out, but I couldn’t believe I had missed this one completely. The poem’s inclusion does make sense, I suppose: the whole book is about self-interested characters trying to charm each other. And there’s a visible shift across the novel from Gatsby’s aloofness, with his showy library (“Knew when to stop too—didn’t cut the pages,” a guest at one of his parties declares), all the way to his final, embarrassingly honest determination to “fix everything the way it was” in order to woo Daisy once more. So the D’Invilliers quotation is a fitting epigraph—another green light leading Gatsby on.

But then I decided to look up Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, figuring he was a nineteenth-century author or a British dignitary. I was wrong. D’Invilliers is a pseudonym for Fitzgerald himself. I was struck by this subtle trick. A pseudonymous epigraph per se isn't all that dishonest, but F. Scott could just as easily have left it unsigned. The same name had surfaced in This Side of Paradise, actually: in that case, D’Invilliers was a stand-in for F. Scott's friend, John Peale Bishop, and in the novel he was an aspiring poet. In real life, as is implied in The Great Gatsby's placing his pseudonym next to several lines of verse, he became an accomplished poet.

But the line's been blurred here: is the Thomas Parke D'Invilliers of the epigraph supposed to refer to John Peale Bishop or Fitzgerald himself? If the author had chosen to call his masterwork Gold-Hatted Gatsby or The High-Bouncing Lover, this question might have been an even more significant one. As it is, it reads like a fumbling attempt on the author's part to erase his presence in the book.

Nick says of himself, “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.” I didn't always buy that Nick was a fully reliable narrator, given the way he often withheld information from me. So I wonder: if Fitzgerald has been playing with truth from that prefatory page of the book, what else has remained buried under his words, undermining or contradicting the seemingly straight trajectory of his story? Few interpretations of The Great Gatsby have succeeded in aligning F. Scott Fitzgerald with any of the characters within, so why does a trace of him linger here? And if Nick is a liar by virtue of his author's manipulations, then how much has he, as a narrator, been hiding from us about the American Dream?

Every year, I read James Joyce’s “The Dead” on the first night of snowfall. I’m not Christian, so the sense of Christmas tradition never resonated for me, but the swirling motifs of snow and wind echo with each winter, the black-ink letterforms intertwined with the white and falling flakes I see outside my windows as I read.

Last year, I came across John Huston’s film version of The Dead. I’d heard about it years before in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the film achieves the near-impossible: it “shows what [film] can do to enhance the enjoyment of a great literary work.” Since so much in Joyce's writing hinges on his perfect construction of sentences and phrases, I wanted to see how film would increase my appreciation.

For the larger part of the story, Joyce’s prose hews closely to realism, and it was a simple pleasure to watch the characters enact the same words and motions on the screen, from pouring drinks to dancing with each other. As I watched at home, my brother the classical pianist-turned-keyboardist overheard Mary Jane’s piano performance, “full of runs and difficult passages,” and remarked that whoever was playing was unusually good. The whole thing seemed to be a perfectly executed and emotionally fulfilling period drama, carefully steeped in political discussions and subtle allusions to Irish cities and struggles.

The true genius of Joyce’s story, however, is in his gradual shift from realism to carefully tempered stream of consciousness, as the protagonist Gabriel realizes that he may have never loved his wife—or, for that matter, anyone else—nearly as much as his wife and a young, now-dead man namedMichael Furey once loved each other many years before:

So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life ... He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.

Constantly I hear reports from the front lines of newspapers and blogs that the novel is ailing, is dying, is dead. But moments like this convince me otherwise, when I am able to so fully enter another person’s consciousness that, unlike with theater or film or any other form of art, I am able to forget myself and imagine another world.

I wanted to write about how I could (mis)read James Joyce’s “The Dead” through John Huston’s The Dead. But when the short story’s eye moves gently and surely from Gabriel’s actions to his thoughts to his pure emotions, it’s a joy to read. As I came to the end, hearing those same wordsflattened to a voice-over monologue, even when set against the natural beauty of Ireland in snow, stripped the epiphany of its power to completely immerse and change the reader. Whereas the movie indeed enhanced my enjoyment of the story on the whole, the last five minutes pulled me back to the words on the page, not on the screen. The movie is a masterpiece in its execution, but the novella by virtue of its form surpassed its cinematic imitation.

I was a passive viewer, but I decided to become an active reader again. I turned back to the book in my hand, and admired the way my sensations interlaced with Gabriel's own: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Image: imdb.com

A New York Times review of Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, a new book on manners by Henry Alford, got me thinking about how much of my social grace I’ve gleaned from works of fiction. Beyond the more obvious social dramas of Austen or Fitzgerald, books can provide useful advice on how to act in certain situations—and warn of the consequences when certain behaviors are found undesirable.

I figured, if James could look to literature to gain a little perspective on zoophiles, I could consult the bookshelf to learn how to behave. What follows is a brief guide to help you get started.

• All little children should be given Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sure, it’s a little violent, but unimaginable horror never killed an eight year-old. The lesson here is embodied in the boy: at the end of days, walking around starving, the little guy hardly ever complains (or talks, for that matter), and he's spectacularly polite and loving towards his father. Does your kid whine about not getting the candy cereal at the grocery store? Hand him or her a copy. Maybe read it at night before they go to bed. See what happens.
• Do you know any sexual deviants who just need to shut up about it already? Give them a copy of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. One of the beauties of Gaitskill’s short stories is how remarkably calm everybody is about how messed up their sex is. As uncomfortable and sometimes harmful as her characters can be, Gaitskill narrates in a way that shuts down all the annoying, gossipy shock value and allows the perverts to be precisely what they are: just humans.
• Even though it was published way back in 1962, I think Another Country by James Baldwin should be handed out to every white, liberal-leaning heterosexual along with their organic oats and fair trade coffee. Have you ever referred to someone else’s partner as their "roommate"? Do you decorate with the aim of exhibiting your knowledge of cultural difference? Maybe you’re super well-intentioned but don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Mr. Baldwin can tell you.
• Is there anything worse than the plethora of man-children running around today? Guys in their twenties and thirties shirking the responsibilities of career, family, haircuts, bathing. Maybe it’s time for a good look at one of the prototypes of the modern man-child: Rabbit, Run by John Updike. The book should be read not to shore up men's juvenile mindsets, but to show them that their very special feelings of entrapment and angst are anything but new. Besides, until you can narrate your life at the level of Updike’s prose, your angst won’t even get you any attention.

But the best reason to pick up a book of fiction? It might not even be the wisdom between the covers, but that your chances of fucking up decrease if your nose is stuck in one.

Image: tylershields.com

Would-be roman-fleuve writers: don't equate quaffing as much coffee as Honoré de Balzac with prolific yields. For the father of the naturalist novel, regular 15-hour stints fueled by that blessed brew still weren't sufficient to finish his multi-volume magnum opus La Comédie humane. Though in Balzac's defense, he did complete some 91 works, like the charmingly titledL'envers de l'histoire contemporaine, aka The Seamy Side of History.

Hear caffeine's effects from Balzac himself: "Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges ... the paper is spread with ink — for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

My pulse raced just reading that. Mind you, I grew up around Houston, TX, land of purple drank, at the psychoactive spectrum's extreme opposite end. I achieved some of my best writing as a freshman at the University of Texas, when a semester-spanning head cold meant daily draughts of Dimetapp. While I wasn't sippin' on some syzzurp beyond the prescribed dosage, the dextromethorphan did wonders for my Japanese Ghost Stories papers. I forewent speaking in class (thanks to dex's dissociative effects), but my ambrosial deciphering of selections from Kwaidan and Ugetsu prompted my predilection for J-Horror.

I was a ubiquitous presence at the 24-hour coffeehouse near campus. I didn't share Balzac's focused work ethic and caffeine tolerance, though I subsisted nights on "hammerheads"—the cafe's name for a pint glass of black coffee with two shots of espresso, like a nerve-rattling sake bomb—and secondhand smoke, while writing on Italian modernist cinema.

Now absinthe, that's an addiction I'd like to claim. Here in NYC, I frequented White Star, mixmaster Sasha Petraske's former brick-lined corridor down on Essex Street. I'd chase la fée verte while negotiating my art-critique notes. It was like my own Midnight in Paris, but what impressionable young romantics haven't imagined themselves within fin de siècle Paris?

I've never attended a gallery opening under the influence of absinthe. Though it's quite clear art and excessive booze don't well mix. Nor have I been bothered to procure my own absinthiana accoutrements to serve it at home (that spigot fountain, the Pontarlier reservoir glasses, the damn slotted spoons). I suppose a bottle of Kübler Superieure might suffice, but for me—an aficionado if not a total addict—the preparation ritual is as important as the enduring round-edged buzz.

Photo: composite image of Big Moe and Honoré de Balzac, culled from Wikipedia and Photo-chopped by the author