“Weird,” surely, would be the adjective elicited by a survey of responses to Marcus’s first three works of fiction. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery.
Unless they are subscribers to Harper’s or The New Yorker, admirers of the experimental fiction of Ben Marcus are likely to find themselves somewhat baffled by the four stories that make up the first section of Leaving the Sea-although not, perhaps, as baffled as the uninitiated reader who picked up Marcus’s previous collection of stories, The Age of Wire and String, published in 1995, and perused, say, the opening of the first one, “Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife”:
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