It’s a distant relative to Virginia Woolf’s style in “The Waves,” a wash of abstract beauty. He has a loyal following of readers who have embraced his bold, hyperfluent vision. There’s something so seductive about Marcus’ imagination and flow of language, as abstract as it can be. “In daylight,” Marcus writes in “First Love,” “she wore motion-limiting weights called shoes.” In “Origins of the Family,” he writes: “When they discuss children they are trying to discover if they can create a new set of bones together” and “The police ride velvet-covered bone-cages called horses.” Marcus endows them with a minimalist sensibility - it reminded me, at times, of the early Talking Heads, with David Byrne singing with naïve simplicity about buildings and food. The men in these deeply interior pieces are both primitive and infantile in their perceptions. The effects of a radically changed universe are often alluded to, but the facts of that universe remain obscured. They are doggedly nonspecific, set, like Marcus’s novel “The Flame Alphabet” (2012), in a dystopian near future where words have disappeared, or where love has become a scientific endeavor, or where offices are brave new worlds and bosses are mysterious envoys of totalitarian regimes. At the other end of the spectrum in “Leaving the Sea” are the stories in the second half, which are so intentionally and expertly abstruse that you feel as if you’re drowning in symbols.
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