![]() ![]() Tradition has shown us some things that work really, really well. I think when you’re writing and trying to make a world and make it come to life, to make feeling in another person, there are a lot of tools to do that. I’ve been reviewed that way: “He tried to do narrative and he can’t.” The idea that there are divisions between these spaces just doesn’t seem that accurate. One thing that’s come up in talking to a few people who didn’t like your book is the assumption that people who write non-narrative or “experimental” fiction do so because they’re unable to write satisfying narrative fiction. I spoke to Marcus in mid- February about ambiguity, readability indexes, and writing a “love letter to language.” ![]() LeBov runs grotesque experiments in the facility he’s also fascinated by Sam’s religious practices - he and Claire are “forest Jews” who worship in a hole (sometimes referred to as a “Jew hole”) dug into the earth, listening to staticky sermons broadcast through the earth by unknown rabbis in unknown places. Forsyth is run by the mysterious LeBov, a devilsh redheaded stranger who first appears in the novel as Murphy, Sam’s inquisitive neighbor. ![]() The novel follows Sam, as he abandons his teenage daughter, Esther, and loses his wife, Claire, before ultimately ending up in Forsyth, a cloistered medical lab where Sam experiments with “scripts,” hoping to find some way to communicate that won’t destroy him. ![]() In The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus’s third book, the language of children has suddenly, inexplicably become toxic to adults. ![]()
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