Forgive me, psych majors, if I am wrong in this, but I seem to recall learning in my Psych Disorders class two years ago about several studies which proved that the life-outlook of individuals suffering from Depression is, in fact, not overly pessimistic, but rather fairly realistic compared to the realities of probability. Psychologically “healthy” individuals, by contrast, tend to be overly optimistic in their predictions for the future. That is, if depressed individuals and not-depressed individuals were asked to predict whether or not they would get a job in the first year out of college, according to these studies, the depressed individuals would be more likely to be correct.
Whether or not this is, in fact, true, we could certainly make a case for all the terrible things happening across the world everyday which we choose to ignore, as well as the terrifying existential questions which we usually put out of our minds, and say that on the whole, day to day, most of us are choosing to live in blissful ignorance. We could, of course, make the case in the other direction—that on the whole, day to day, we ignore most of the beauty and the miracles of life (I mean, I am not a science major, so the fact that our brains can heal from trauma and that plants know to grow upwards out of the soil and not downwards into the soil and that the universe is expanding and folding in on itself at the same time— all of that feels like a miracle to me, but call it what you will).
However, Ben Marcus, author of the new short-story collection Leaving the Sea released this January by Knopf Publishing, is most certainly of the former opinion. A narrator in his story “Watching Mysteries with My Mother” notices that the families of individuals with terminal illness insist that their loved one is “a fighter”; she will be the one to “beat the odds.” But “odds should be odds, and they should never be beaten,” he writes, “If they are, then the odds are incorrect and should be changed.” Later he recognizes that his mother’s odds of dying are increasing at every moment as she ages. “Right now, sleeping in her bed, she has never in her entire life been in greater danger of dying.”
The moral, I guess, would be that life is often more arbitrary and unpleasant than we would like to think, which is possibly the only certitude standing behind the characters of Marcus’s stories, fifteen middle-aged male protagonists who seem painfully aware of the fact that their lives are not at all turning out as they would have hoped. Marcus, the author of three novels including The Flame Alphabet and the winner of three Pushcart Prizes, finds his own place among such bleakly sardonic storytellers as Kafka, Beckett, and the Coen brothers. His characters are often pathetic, utterly failing to communicate, and disgusted with the shortcomings of language and of their own bodies. If they happen to fall in love, it is “through several mutual misunderstandings.”
The stories begin in a familiar and disappointing modern world—a divorced dad finds his cubicle at work overtaken by interns, a middle-aged son watches British mystery-dramas on PBS and cannot forget about his mother’s mortality. Marcus’s voice feels grippingly vivid and current; he doesn’t try anything fancy with his sentences (save for one sentence which goes on for six pages—and yet miraculously manages not to be annoying). Here and there, Marcus points out small sensations of daily existence which we might never before have noticed.
As his stories progress, the recognizable world and the forms of language themselves begin to dissolve, and the characters waver between struggling to survive and wishing to disappear. The reader is left alone without sign posts, only grounded in the recurrent rhythms of the stories, and in the glimpses of suggestion which make these wildly violent dystopias seem strangely similar to the reality we swim in every day. “We know nothing about the future,” the characters of one story remember from a sort of gymnasium cum bomb-shelter—we know very little for sure at all.
The reader is as lost as the characters, and often frustrated and exhausted by the tediums of the everyday and by the devastating awareness that human life might be nothing more than a mistake. “I would have gills,” thinks one of the narrators, “if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea.” But one keeps reading, I think, because every so often, even as Thomas inches for what feels like a thousand years worth of over-wrought anxiety down the office hallway towards the beautiful, indifferent colleague at the coffee cart—every so often, one miraculously finds a moment of peace.
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