![]() ![]() ![]() We meet up with him in Germany, where he is a supposed to be receiving a medical treatment. The character of Julian in the story “The Dark Arts” is representative. The world is experienced as something “too complex to know and far too terrible to join.” Even the nuclear family has become an unfeeling battleground of separate states. Other people are presented as being without pity or understanding, mere functionaries in mindless - and at times vicious - bureaucracies. having sex even!Īs we leave recognizably real situations and settings behind, the conflict between the hero and his social environment becomes more sharply defined. ![]() ![]() Nobody seems to care about them or their problems, and everyone around them seems to be having more fun. As one of the species recognizes, such men are the “cattle in our lives we hardly ever see.” They are lonely, depressed, and even a little angry. They are men of a certain age, fighting losing battles against weight gain and hair loss. In the beginning, and the stories start out more-or-less normal and progressively get stranger, our protagonists seem like familiar types. What Ben Marcus offers is a sort of literary shock treatment for these shut-ins. Underlying all the diversity, however, is a consistent set of anxieties surrounding the alienated figure of the contemporary middle-aged American male. The stories in Leaving the Sea range a great deal in terms of style, from a fairly realistic portrayal of intergenerational domestic conflict to a ribbon of metafiction consisting of a single run-on-and-on sentence. ![]()
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