In the first section’s second story, “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” Marcus continues to develop the themes introduced in “What Have You Done?” while subtly beginning to undermine the realist style that governs much of the collection. “What Have You Done?” thus innocuously establishes the narrative at the collection’s core: the desperate, lonely man unable to find solace in his loved ones, his body, or his own tormented soul. Paul, like nearly all of the collection’s central characters, is overweight and ashamed of his body, as well as his sexual urges. Paul, the story’s pathetic yet sympathetic antihero, embodies these struggles as he comes home for a family reunion to finally tell his family about his wife and son, only to find that, based on a tragic history of which the reader learns little, they do not believe a word of it. “What Have You Done?” introduces Leaving the Sea’s central concern with three of the most fraught, complex human relationships: with one’s lover, with one’s family, and with one’s own body.

Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, the first of which contains four of the most traditional pieces. As a result, despite its formal heterogeneity, Leaving the Sea stands among the most cohesive story collections in recent memory. The range of structures and registers allows Marcus to explore his themes from strange, conflicting angles, lending the collection a power far greater than any of its parts. But in Leaving the Sea, the pieces’ stylistic disparities cut against each other in a harsh, dissonant beauty. Such diversity, in the hands of a lesser writer, might result in a fractured, aimless failure. The stories range from straightforward narratives to lyrical soliloquies to surrealist mini-epics. Leaving the Sea finds Marcus exhibiting the full scope of his stylistic range. That is to say, it is a realist story, and it is far from the only one: more than a third of the collection’s fifteen pieces could be reasonably called “traditional stories.”īut that leaves much of the collection unaccounted for.

“What Have You Done?” is an aching portrait of a man’s inability to repair his relationship with his family after years of abuse and lies, evoked by subdued, contemplative prose. As Full Stop contributor David Burr Gerrard noted in the introduction to his recent interview with Ben Marcus, his former teacher, Marcus is not only “one of America’s foremost practitioners of experimental fiction,” but also “one of America’s foremost pugilists of experimental fiction.” Given Marcus’ reputation as both a defender of the experimental and as a literary auteur himself, the opening story of Leaving the Sea, his new collection of short stories, is initially puzzling.

Leaving the sea by ben marcus