The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

Based on a generic synopsis, Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012) would seem to be another end-of-the-world novel with a unique gimmick. Instead of a comet posed to strike the surface of the earth or a zombie pandemic or a despairingly possible nuclear proliferation, the means of the world’s demise rests in language. In particular, speaking and writing makes all the adults progressively, cumulatively sick until they die. Children are immune until they turn eighteen years old, so they become the most dangerous practitioners of language, forcing parents and loved ones into desperate circumstances.

This is not a novel about Armageddon, despite the religious themes and plot points that crop up throughout. Instead, I think of it as apocalyptic, in the oldest meaning of that word, defined as revelatory. The story is told from the single viewpoint of a father and husband, Samuel, as he comes to terms with the realities of toxic language and the breakdown of his family as his daughter Esther becomes poisonous to him and his wife Claire. Sam’s account is a testament of what happened to him and his family, and while he gets caught up in science and intrigue through the course of the novel, the book is really about him and how the bonds of love and family decay and die gruesomely.

I’ve been aware of Ben Marcus ever since I read his edited collection The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004). I’d like to write a retro-review of that book whenever I get around to re-reading it. He introduced me to some major American voices for the first time, including: Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, Anthony Doerr, Stephen Dixon, Brian Evenson, William Gay, Jhumpa Lahiri, Wells Tower, and Rick Bass. Just look at that cover!

I apologize for the digression, but it contextualizes my awareness of The Flame Alphabet when it debuted. It was a sensation and I quietly added it to my ‘to-read list.’ That list only grows, it never shrinks. With my luck, I found that the library within walking distance down the street from my apartment had a copy of Marcus’s novel.

Which brings me to Sam’s narrative. He is his own worst enemy. Sam is Jewish and he tells us he practices a secret form of Judaism, which description brilliantly combines elements of science fiction with superstition. The significance of this early revelation pays plot points later but also serves to put us in mind of the kind of person Sam is in the story. He’s secretive, methodical, quiet, suspicious, and patient. The nature of his particular brand of faith requires a lack of comprehension and a singularly personal perspective. No one within this sect is allowed to talk about his faith with anyone else, including and especially family members and spouses/children. Though Sam and Claire both tend their secret devotions together as husband and wife they never once speak of what they hear or experience spiritually with each other. For Sam this kind of faith and life is what’s expected and we learn he’s accepted it. The downside that he rarely acknowledges is the gaping distance that exists perpetually between him and his own family. He often excuses it away as the nature of marriage and of parenthood, and his talent for explaining away deeply problematic situations goes into overdrive when the language toxicity first strikes his home.

Language as the source of destruction, the weapon and means of annihilation, destroys the world, but Sam manages to persevere and even thrive in this new condition. He takes matters into his own hands early on to experiment on his daughter to determine the full extent of her destructive capabilities, while also testing remedies and defenses on himself and his wife. He believes these actions will save his family when what’s destroying them is the earlier lack of communication that has desiccated their bonds and prevented them coming together against this crisis.

The following passage struck me powerfully as I read, so I had to underline it in my library copy:

 

Suddenly all my readings of Derrida and deconstructionist theory came back from memory. Sam is writing about the secret sermons he hears broadcast over underground wires (it’s complicated, and never explained), but he’s also writing from the retrospective distance at the end of the book when the world is essentially doomed by language toxicity. The implication is staggering: language is not only self-defeating but it's destructive as well. But what chills me is he already believed this before words became literally deadly.

Later Sam links the cause of language’s destructive force to comprehension. It is the understanding of something being communicated which triggers the toxicity in the human body, making it sicker and sicker unto death. Only a language that communicates nothing, or that is incapable of being comprehended as communicating anything, would be safe. Thus it makes a kind of sense that children start out immune. They absorb, but they don’t process until later when their brains take shape and they develop true critical thinking skills. Sam tells us that even deaf people sicken at sign language or reading lips. This turns out to be great news for Sam because, already silent and secretive, he has always refused to face or understand the most basic needs and truths about his family or his relationship with them. He is unwilling to understand anything about his life or himself, and thereby he survives to the end of the book, outliving just about everyone else we meet along the way. Later acts damn him further, but it’s his failure as a father and husband that repulses me the most. His family was doomed from the beginning because he could not relate to them or understand their very basic needs and wants. They are ever mysterious to him as he is mysterious to himself, yet he cannot understand why they break apart as the world crumbles around them.

This resonates with me because of my own longstanding fear of being a father, in which I am unable to care for, understand, or communicate with my own child. Sam, at the end of the book, finally reflects on his role in Esther’s life and he comes to this line: “Fatherhood is perhaps another name for something done badly.” Despite the seeming confession here, Sam hardly takes responsibility for his poor parenting. In fact, opposite the next page he sees his reunion with his daughter after their long separation as the act that will redeem his fatherhood in her eyes, making his seemingly earlier self-awareness now ironic. This is poignantly underscored by the fact that the eighteen year old that Sam reunites with doesn’t resemble his daughter and he wonders briefly if she actually isn’t Esther at all, but just some random girl with the same color hair and somewhat similar shaped face. He ultimately rejects this suspicion, but the one way he could clarify beyond a doubt is denied him. He can’t ask her name without hurting her irrevocably. Marcus renders this brilliantly because I sympathize with Sam’s impossible dilemma while also despising him deeply.

I think about the family, friends, and loved ones in my life I’ve frightened, hurt, or alienated, and in all instances it comes back to the words I used. Sometimes I verbally lashed out due to anger or bitterness. Other times it was in my attempts to convince or cajole. The worst is always when I try to say what I think is the right thing but it instead only cuts sharper than if I had slapped them across the face. And of course there is what goes unsaid as well

But that’s where the book has been instructive. Language is dangerous, volatile. Possessing a Ph.D. in English, I should know better than most people the violence that language can wreck, not just politically and culturally, but on an individual level between people. I want to be heard and understood. I want to change what happens through my careful selection of words. Had I read The Flame Alphabet sooner, I would have learned what's really needed. More important than speaking is listening. More important than being understood is understanding. Words must invite, not assault. And knowing it now, comprehending it as it were, do I really grasp it or have I failed again by this attempt to articulate it?