The resulting work dares and confronts the boundaries of what novels are supposed to look like and do. For his second novel, Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, Sparling and his wife hand made it to order. More recently, The Serial Library guts and re-appropriates old hardcover books that Sparling then loans out to readers via snail mail. Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, however, is where the artistic trajectory of this under-read voice begins, which is why Mud Luscious Press’ recent reissue (with a new foreword by the author) is such great news.

In Dad, like Sparling’s other books, typical narrative markers whisper only at the peripheries. Minimal, sometimes hermetic, vignettes readily shift in time and perspective, leaving us to cobble together just the story’s gist. It goes something like this: Ken Sparling—author, narrator, protagonist—is locked in a dissolving marriage with Tutti. Some nameless break has turned their past of “so much love” into a present where Tutti feigns sleep to avoid conversation. Ken looks to Sammy, his young son, for connection, but the solaces are sporadic. Even the moments that should be easiest bristle with frustration and menace; as Ken notes one night after Sammy’s meltdown over fish cakes, “dinner comes along every night, relentlessly, like a bomb.”

Ken Sparling

These trials stoke Ken’s memories about his own parents’ separation, particularly those memories about his eponymous Dad, a figure of stunted effort and pity, and more importantly, a possible herald of Ken’s future. Ken remembers his Dad post-divorce, staring at the house his ex-wife and children now inhabit without him: “He stood at the end of the driveway of our new place with the snow getting on his shoulders.” And with Dad’s blurring of perspective and time, it’s like Ken’s looking at himself out there.

To say Dad is a sad story, though, would overemphasize story. And sadness isn’t a narrative here as much as it’s a haze coating the details of Ken’s daily life in Toronto. Dad’s deepest heat abides in these particulars, in the novel’s uncanny power as an arrangement of crystalline instants. At points Sparling names the world with such accuracy, even its most mundane corners turn unnerved, sharp-edged, and stunned. A car’s intermittent wipers talk metaphysics: “Every five seconds the windshield wipers sweep across the windshield and things get clear again for a moment.” Nascent moments of sexual development get the confusedly circular treatment they deserve: “It was having the boner that gave me the boner.” And Sparling catches and articulates the moment a relaxing day instantly, claustrophobically, telescopes into existential panic: “I was reading Chekhov one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Tutti out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. Tutti was looking at me. For a long moment I felt lost.” Family, deadpan humor, home, disappointment, and memory give these disparate snippets their tentative connective threads. And as much as Sparling denies—sometimes caustically—the conventional narrative modes, his recursive striking of these notes builds a signature momentum.

Dad ultimately sustains because it offers a bald encounter with a subjectivity shaped and defined by language, something other narrative forms just can’t do. In his foreword Sparling talks about writing as the site where the “wholeness of intent” meets the “fragments of story,” a dialogue that terminates when “the weight of the fragments pulls the wholeness of intention down and kills it.” Wholeness and fragment, intent and implication, love and its disintegrations: these same tussles split Ken and Tutti, Ken and Sammy, and Ken and his Dad. There’s sadness there. It exists intermixed with memory and quick flash cul-de-sacs of joy, but it’s finally, enduringly sad. And what Sparling knows so adeptly is how that sadness thrums through language, in the chasm that opens when words somehow always fall short of the exact names we might want or feel, even in the moments when the words seem just right.

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This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone. The floors pop and crack all night long. Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making. Then there’s Van Buren who inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor, as did poor old James Madison. Of course Andrew Johnson was the worst mistreated of any of them. So the tortured souls who were and are misrepresented in history are the ones who come back.”

No doubt Truman’s thinking here springs partially from self-preservation. After all, this entry comes just seventeen months after he personally okayed the instantaneous obliteration of two large Japanese cities. It’s only natural his thoughts might tend toward hauntings, the intense weight of elected office, and a portrait of the president as a man subject to terrible “conditions not of his making.”

But there’s also genuine sympathy in Truman’s imagined purgatory of ghosts here. The loneliness he voices is the loneliness of a public figure who realizes he doesn’t belong to himself anymore, a man who can almost feel himself turning into a full-fledged subject of history. Like Buchanan, Madison, and Johnson before him, Truman knows he’ll one day become the sum total of all those misremembered, partial, and editorialized stories people will tell about him when he’s not around. American history—that silo where so much national desire gets housed—will become the space that both animates and imprisons him. Faced with a tricky narrative terrain like that, it’s hard to blame him for being concerned about how he might look.

Alex Forman

Like Truman, Alex Forman is deeply interested in the way American presidents get represented and what those representations might mean. Riffing on a format that will no doubt look familiar to anyone who remembers the slim presidential biographies that dot public school libraries, Tall, Slim & Erect combines the visual and the literary, reducing each of the first thirty-seven presidents to a portrait and a one-page bio. The net result isn’t an intentional act of misrepresentation (Truman’s ghost can breathe easy), but rather a playful, oftentimes eerie, act of multiple-representation, an exploration of the presidents as spectral men living somewhere between historical fact and the disparate narratives of national myth.

Let’s start with the portraits. Forman’s photographs are of miniature presidential figurines (a collection designed by the Louis Marx Toy Company, popular in the mid-twentieth century) that she chanced across at a flea market. Shot in extreme close-up, the three-inch tall plastic molds swell and dominate the frame, which grotesquely highlights the creases in foreheads, the positioning of hands, and the subtle shock locked away in many of the figurines’ eyes. The cumulative effect is unsettling and mesmerizing. Forman encodes full-on narratives in each one of these portraits, and believe it or not, a lot can be gained from staring at the puffer-fish swollenness of Pierce’s face (a side-effect of his alcoholism?) or the shadowy cleft that scores LBJ’s chin like a machete wound. Why, we ask, is Harding peeking at us from around a corner? What’s keeping John Tyler from looking us directly in the eye? And why might Lincoln have his back turned, walking away, as if he were trying to vanish into the binding of the book?

These photographic narratives play off and inform the short biographies that follow them, textual mash-ups Forman has cribbed from letters, novels, history books, and websites. These anecdotes focus primarily on the corporeal and arcane, chronicling a wide, and often funny, variety of presidential curiosities. John Quincy Adams was flatulent and liked skinny-dipping in the Potomac. FDR was anorexic, Madison arthritic. George Washington may have been impotent. Some of Forman’s other finds tread seedier ground: affairs (FDR and Kennedy), possible secret histories of homosexuality (Buchanan, Arthur, Lincoln), and even hints of incest (Rutherford B. Hayes).

Forman emphasizes her role as a curator, not a creator, of these biographies, openly admitting in her bibliographic headnote that “none of the text herein was written by me.” But while calling Tall, Slim & Erect an “unwritten” book might accurately describe its reliance on found materials, it drastically downplays the particular intelligence of Forman’s selective methods. Every sentence here has existed before, but never in this particular way. It’s Forman’s appropriative threading—intentional and meticulous—that illuminates and renews the language.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Forman’s knack for honing in on and juxtaposing the drastic tonal shifts that mark the wide-ranging territory of presidential biography. Some sentences here are purely descriptive (“Taft was 5 feet 11 ½ inches tall.”). Others are interpretive or veer toward the critical (“Lacking drive or decision in civilian life, [Grant] was a failure in everything he did.”). And some teeter into the outright lionization you might expect more readily from a fan contributing his two cents to Bob Seger’s Wikipedia page (“Theodore Roosevelt was an artist of power.”).

President James Pierce

This mix, of course, closely approximates the way history actually works for most of us, where the presidents exist as little more than the trivia we haphazardly collect about them, but these drastic shifts also remind us of the way that the presidency often serves as one of the focal points of America’s mythic projection of itself, a conduit of both national anxiety and desire. In Madison’s biography, for example, the clinical appraisal of his height and weight (at 5’4” and 100 pounds, he was the tiniest president) is followed, almost in the same breath, with this account: “This withered little apple-John was the father of the Constitution.” It’s the way Forman collides empirical realism with the perfectly struck chord of folksy grandeur that’s especially revealing here: the montage hints at something hard-edged, then veers sharply toward the populist and democratic. It embodies a principle Americans want desperately to believe about themselves, as if the mind behind the Constitution was just another version of Rudy, undersized but plucky, able to make the football team through sheer will.

This montage method of composition gives Forman’s biographies their strange, compelling type of noise, and it elegantly allows her to accomplish two things at once. On the one hand, the historical nuggets on presidential bodies work to humanize figures who are too often portrayed—on our money, in the portraits lining our classrooms, by Tea Party purists who believe Jefferson’s quill was divinely inspired and infallible—as pure things of myth. To be reminded that these men were corporeal de-elevates the tempting notion of American exceptionalism, offering a healthy reminder that the supposed great men who led the supposed-greatest country in history also got the hiccups.

But just as these bodily anecdotes lull us into thinking that the presidents aren’t all that different from you or me, Forman injects her biographies with daunting historical realities that compel us to remember, frighteningly, that they are. When we read, for example, that Truman “was briefed about the atomic bomb for only thirty minutes, after he had become president,” or that Jackson’s signing of the Indian Removal Act displaced over 45,000 American Indians, the effect can be chilling. Moments like these hit like lightning flashes, and they’re an awful reminder of the earth-shifting power we actually put in the hands of a human beings who shit, fart, and get toothaches.

Ultimately, I don’t think Forman is suggesting that the presidents are empty figures, vacancies created solely by the narratives we tell about them. Her close corporeal focus persistently reminds us that there is a “there” there in this case. But Tall, Slim & Erect is interested in interrogating the nature of historical coherence. Even as the language works formally to give the semblance of “unified” portraits, the wide-ranging accounts are centrifugal in force. The sentences, both in what they say and how they say it, strain at one another, catapulting the presidents through the prism of history, leaving only fragments and hazy lines of demarcation. Even as we turn the pages and see them pinned like insects in microscopic close up, the feeling we’re left with is one of whether or not we’ll ever be able to see these men, or anything for that matter, with the clarity we’d hoped for.

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This isn’t because I’m particularly drawn to cleanliness, but because I’m drawn to the readerly space that a hot tub of water can create. The stillness of a full bathtub—that sporadic spigot drip, the lazy drawdown of heat, the tiles’ passionless whiteness—spins a hive of deep focus for me. I can’t think of anywhere else quite like it, a space where I can sit so completely uninterrupted, fixated even (I do a lot of rereading in the bathtub too), with a piece of language.

Also, the internet can’t come in there, and it’s ridiculous what that does to my ability to concentrate.

I’ve made my way through everything from US Weekly to Ulysses while steeping in bathwater, but a full catalog of my tub reading would no doubt show that my tastes tend more toward the tight and the claustrophobic. My bath time reading favors those books with strange rhythms, those already intense books that get somehow amplified further by heat and stillness. One summer I read almost all of Kafka exclusively in the tub; Letters to Milena came and went in one long overnight stretch. Much of Beckett I read with my ears submerged; I think I wanted the words to burrow into my head without having a way out. Blake Butler’s got some great bathtub books. Brian Evenson, too.

And so does Nathanael West, whose 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, I read most recently—you guessed it—in the bathtub. Miss Lonelyhearts is an extremely thin book (my copy clocks in under 60 pages), and I got into the bath thinking I would knock it out in an hour. But even with the novel’s vignette structure and straight-edged sentences, West’s little novel that June afternoon began reading like a book that was much longer than it actually was. The action got sluggish and oppressive quick. A gross uncanniness began to seep in. West’s sentences were looking light and easy on the page, but reading them was like walking through piles of compost.

On page thirty, I got to the line—“You’re still pretty,’ he said without knowing why, except that he was frightened”—and I had to put the book down.

Somehow I was feeling dirtier than when I got into the water. And inexplicably, like Miss Lonelyhearts, I was feeling a little frightened too.

If you haven’t read it, Miss Lonelyhearts fixes an almost vertiginous close up on a burnt-out advice columnist for the New York Post-Dispatch. Every morning, the title character, who’s really a man, comes face to face with an inbox swollen with his readers’ afflictions. “Desperate,” a teenage girl who was “born without a nose,” seeks solace for her crippling deformity. “I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself,” she writes. She ends by asking Miss Lonelyhearts if she should kill herself. In another letter, the fifteen year old “Harold S.” deals with the fallout of seeing his deaf and dumb sister get molested on a rooftop: “If I tell mother she will beat Gracie up awful because I am the only one who loves her and last time when she tore her dress they locked her in the closet for 2 days.”

Advice columns tend to be palpable when the stakes are relatively low: I’ve been invited to two weddings on the same day, what now!? How do I convince my wife that her mother doesn’t need to come on every single family vacation? For any number of Dear Abbys and Prudences, questions like these are the wheelhouse of syndicated advice giving. But the letters Miss Lonelyhearts gets—syntactically broken, utterly ill-equipped—are of a different ilk entirely. They traffic in real, deep-seated suffering and blistering pain. And the fact that these people have only an anonymous advice columnist to turn to just deepens the acuteness of their desperation.

Miss Lonelyhearts is tasked with being the Christ-like salve to all these wounded souls. Understandably, the journalistic platitudes he has in the tank—life is worthwhile, seek out art’s consoling power, etc.—can’t even begin to sandbag his readers’ overflowing shit creek. How, with a tight deadline, a strict word count, and a demanding readership, can he possibly muster a sufficient response to “Sick-of-it-all,” a pregnant mother of seven with acute kidney pain, whose physical ailments really reflect an unanswerable cosmic, metaphysical problem: “I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do”?

The city Miss Lonelyhearts encounters outside his daily column only deepens his feelings of helplessness. Most days, West’s hero half-drunkenly traces a purgatorial circle between his office and the neighborhood speakeasy, where his colleagues suggest that all women writers would be better off with a “good rape.” His closest friend is his feature editor, Shrike, and he’s no friend at all. A blasphemous, shrieking, hyper-misogynous prick (he shares his name with a bird of prey whose Latin name means “butcher”), Shrike spends most of the novel belittling Miss Lonelyhearts’ misery and half-heartedly trying to catch the columnist in an affair with his wife.

At night, Miss Lonelyhearts retreats to his apartment that’s decorated sparsely with an ivory crucifix. The cross has been removed, leaving only Christ’s body awkwardly impaled on the wall with nails. He fitfully dreams about bleeding doorknobs and butchered lambs, about swastikas, dicks, and crosses that he sculpts from junk he’s found at a pawn shop.

From the novel’s beginning, West fudges the boundaries between Miss Lonelyhearts’ fevered dreaming and his day-to-day life. All of New York is nothing but confused sex, phallic architecture, and whiskey delirium; a town lacerated with surreal violence and less than zero moral code or causal logic. Miss Lonelyhearts sleeps with women, doesn’t sleep with women, yanks women’s nipples, sobs in front of women, or hits women. It’s all the same. One night, he runs into a man cruising a park for sex, takes him out for drinks and small talk, then twists the man’s arm until he screams in pain. None of it matters.

West’s world here is deadpan through and through, and, even as the action descends further into its particular brand of nightmarish foulness, it never once breaks from its chilling flattening of affect. For much of the time, as readers, we stand back and watch voyeuristically, distanced and a little nauseated, just another iteration of Miss Lonelyhearts scanning a distraught letter. But at the same time, the bald immediacy of West’s language, its relentlessness, its completely impassive grossness (it’s like all the action’s being shot through a fisheye lens), also somehow forces you right to the dead center of things. You become part and parcel of the book’s rotting heat. And as much as that might speak to West’s technical skill, it still doesn’t feel all that great.

Even more troubling (and this, I think is the unsettling genius of this little book) is how quickly you get acclimated to the callousness. West’s novel is a book so dead it deadens you, and when Miss Lonelyhearts, on the way to work, sees “a ragged woman with an enormous goiter pick a love story magazine out of a garbage can and seem very excited by her find,” the strangest thing about that image is that, by that point in the book, it seems like the most normal thing in the world.

That may be why I finally had to finish Miss Lonelyhearts while sitting outside. I think I needed the trees, the lighter air, maybe a squirrel, for counterweight.

Nathanael West died in a car crash when he was only 37, gone before anybody on America’s literary scene really knew he was there. More than one person has told me that he died driving to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral, that he was so heartbroken and unfocused behind the wheel that he blew through a stop sign. The more likely explanation, though, is that West blew through that stop sign and straight into a Pontiac sedan because he’d always been a notoriously fast and sloppy driver.

It’s the haphazardness of this wreck, West’s carelessness, that makes it a poetic fate for the author of a novel like Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s often difficult to wrap our head around the fact that human suffering might just be the result of haphazard chance. We prefer our narratives (and our lives) with clear causal connections. But in the back of our mind, we know, like West, that those connections may not be there after all. I cry all the time and I hurt so much and I dont know what to do.

And as we read through Miss Lonelyhearts, we pass by it as if we were witnessing an automobile accident. It’s jagged. It oozes surreality and daze. You rubberneck at the scene, and gawk in horror at the grotesqueness and chaos that the world can muster in an instant. But in the very same moment, you stare in wonderment (and maybe even dare to laugh) because for some reason you’ll never know, that mangled body in the wreckage isn’t you.

In Marion Meade’s Lonelyhearts, a dual biography of West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, she mentions that when West’s body eventually made it to the funeral home, he didn’t have any money on him. Those involved guessed that a hospital attendant had rifled through his pockets after the accident.

And after reading Miss Lonelyhearts, this anecdote—a corpse being pickpocketed by a paramedic just a few days before Christmas—somehow seems like the most normal, human thing in the world.

Miss Lonelyhearts, help us all.

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The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus’ first novel in a decade, opens dramatically en medias exodus. Somewhere in upstate New York, loudspeakers bark into the air as quarantines go into effect and scores of parents cram their cars with anything they can salvage. For the first few pages, it all seems like your run-of-the-mill apocalypse until you realize these evacuees aren’t running away from some typical chemical leak or natural disaster. They’re fleeing their children. More accurately, they’re fleeing their children’s speech, a pathogen grown so toxic that the mere act of listening to a non-adult now comes laced with physical pain, retching, and the onset of “speech fever.” The community swarms with militias of shouting kids, and mothers and fathers, rapidly turning into “dark lumps of flesh moving through plasma,” have got to go.

Scrambling among the evacuees, packing a survival kit that includes “sound abatement fabrics” and a “noise dosimeter, hacked to measure children’s speech,” is Marcus’ narrator, Samuel. For Sam and his wife, Claire, their particular distress seems to be coming from the language of their daughter, Esther, a tween so self-possessed and cruelly articulate that even her most mundane stories about school can drive her parents to cower in terror or retreat into the bathroom to vomit. “Pain is too soft a word for the reaction,” an ailing Sam notes at one point about Esther’s potent speech, “Crushing was more accurate, an intolerable squeezing in the chest and the hips.”

For readers of Marcus’ previous books, a family drama that’s also centrally concerned with language will no doubt sound familiar. And in The Flame Alphabet, Marcus revisits a number of the images and obsessions coursing through Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String. Hidden holes in the ground secrete cryptic voices, language and the human mouth are painted in all their physical glory, and the story ends up deriving much of its energy from Marcus’ startling abilities as an engineer of English syntax. Gone from The Flame Alphabet, however, are the types of narrative intrusions and formal gestures that distinguish Marcus’ earlier books. This is Samuel’s story to tell, and even as he watches his family life dissolve, even as he explains his arcane religious background as a sectarian “Reconstructionist Jew” or details the history of language poison as far back as Pliny, even as he finds himself doing dubious research in the hopes of creating a new, non-lethal language to save his family, Marcus keeps the point of view doggedly consistent, almost downright conventional.

This narrative streamlining shows Marcus’ understanding that, on one level, The Flame Alphabet is telling a deeply traditional story. After all, Sam’s dilemma—a man who loses his family and tries to cope with it—is as old as the Book of Job. But it would be a mistake to think that Marcus’ choice to forego formal innovation here signifies a lack of ambition or thematic seriousness. Rather, The Flame Alphabet is a novel that revisits well-worn myths as a way to expose and explore the pressing questions that we often forget thrum at the heart of our most common traditions and rituals: how is language intimately connected to the construction of power and authority? How can words—choppy breaths pushed through membranes and teeth—affect the heart so profoundly? In what sense do the stories we retell ourselves literally make us? And how might the family be the site where all of these questions go down?

Ben Marcus

Samuel confronts many of these questions himself over the course of the novel. After the initial set up, Marcus brilliantly tracks backward to chronicle the months before the evacuation. As the language disease spreads, Sam watches as all the rituals that once stabilized and structured his life come under attack. The simplest family acts—birthday parties, picnics, the family dinner, asking, “How are you”—become defamiliarized battlegrounds. Even Esther’s mundane summer camp stories teem with steely Freudian contempt:

“Esther looked heavily guarded, as if to say, I have been at horse camp and I have changed considerably, in ways you could never understand, so let’s not waste each other’s time, you old asshole. Stay away from me, you tiny, silly creatures, for you have not been to horse camp.

Out of consideration for her privacy, I did not strive for eye contact.”

These beautiful, brutal sections of The Flame Alphabet contain some of the most thoughtful and moving writing I’ve ever read about family life. Chapter by chapter, we watch as Esther’s viral logic and turns of phrase leave Sam and Claire overwhelmed and reeling. The small responses they muster are alternately sad, funny, petty, deferential, and desperate. When Sam looks for comfort in other areas of his life, he finds them crumbling as well. Attempts at intimacy with Claire become cold and awkward. Soon, she’s a shell completely hollowed out by illness. And when Sam seeks religious solace (he worships at a non-descript forest hovel by tapping into sermons broadcast via a hermetic underground network), he finds none.

Despite intense heartache, though, Sam stubbornly kicks against the pricks of his family’s disintegration. He won’t let Esther go in this story, and his narration of these numerous painful experiences is really a last-ditch effort to delay the inevitable separation. Here, narrative structure becomes a longing backward glance as Sam refuses to say good-bye to his daughter. It’s a painful, accurate mirror of his own deep, fatherly ambivalences about Esther, a young woman who remains the object of his boundless love even as she acts as the source of his destruction.

Eventually, things take a turn when Sam meets a mysterious redhead calling himself Murphy. Keenly knowledgeable about both the language disease and Sam’s increasing family problems, it’s Murphy who suggests that Reconstructionist Jews may hold the keys to a cure. This hope drives Sam in his final attempts to recover his wife and daughter in the novel’s second half. Soon after the evacuation, he travels to Forsythe, an abandoned high school recently refurbished as a makeshift language research center. Here, he’s reunited with Murphy (who may or may not be Murphy) and plunged into an atmosphere of coercion, human test subjects, false identities, and conspiracies. But even as language continues to fail and destroy him, Sam perseveres, clinging to the hope of a family intimacy that goes beyond words, an intimacy channeled through genetics, blood, and the private rituals of home.

Past the sentence-level amazements and sci-fi gadgetry, The Flame Alphabet is really about these complex intimacies that exist (or at least, that we hope exist) between wives and husbands, parents and children. Sam’s stories, and the narratives he wants to believe in, are markedly double-edged. Even as their recurrences and patterns act as a way to stave off chaos, they’re also a continual reminder that that chaos, where all things dissolve and all memory is obliterated, is lurking always in the near distance. It’s a shaky and uncertain balance, and what The Flame Alphabet understands so brilliantly is that these intimacies and routines are tenuous precisely because we can only broker them with language, which is one of the most problematic and slippery rituals we have.

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