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Book Review Notes on a future to be avoided amid the fog of present fragmentation

Notes From the Fog
by Ben Marcus
(Granta, £12.99)

 

“THE TECHNIQUE of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged,” Soviet literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky once argued.

 

It has been the credo of Ben Marcus’s work since his uncategorisable debut Age of Wire and String, a bravura performance of ludic formalism that placed him firmly in the lineage of his US postmodern forebears, John Barth and Donald Barthelme. He’s become something of the lone guardian of an increasingly endangered experimental tradition across the Atlantic.

 

Notes From the Fog, his latest collection of stories, has seen a mellowing of his more abstract belletristic sensibilities — out with cloth-eating bird worshippers and in with the downtrodden employees of the nebulous yet nefarious Thompson Systems. This is not to suggest that the stories have lost their experimental verve, they just more readily signify a recognisable reality and one just round the bend from our own.

 

“It started with bedtime. A coldness. A formality.” The opening line of the first story about a boy who suddenly no longer wants the love of his parents sets the mood, with the linguistic staccato evoking the sterile straitjacket of anhedonia — the reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.

 

Many characters are individuals crippled by their own self-awareness, whose feelings are variously to be invested in, weaponised or shown “so liberally that they come at a discount,” becoming objects merely to be traded. This fragmentation of the human continues in the blandly named corporations where “the future was getting fondled by some of the most anxious and self-regarding minds.”

 

Their laboratories test accelerationist thought experiments — replacing food with light as the primary source of nutrients to boost productivity — or data-farm “emotional narratives” to create the ultimate dating hack.

 

Interpolated between the drudgery of corporate R&D are apocalyptic scenarios depicting survival in ecological disasters and civilisational collapse and these are where the moments of human warmth break through.

 

The universe of this collection can seem a bleak one but the short story form liberates the grotesque vignettes in Thompson Systems from accumulating the crushing ineluctability of a dystopian novel, offering a horizon of potential futures that could be avoided rather than a necessary destination.

 

The affirmative note on which it closes is a reminder that the task of the fiction writer should be to make the world unfamiliar but never seem inevitable.

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