Fierce, scary, hurtful, unsettling, and brilliant, this new work by award-winning novelist Marcus (Notable American Women) reminds us that language is dangerous and that we'll do anything to protect our children, even when they are (literally) killing us. In the world imagined here, a terrible epidemic has descended: whenever children speak, adults sicken and eventually die. At first, only Jewish families are stricken, stirring echoes of history's uglier sentiments. But soon every adult is affected. Near death, with her ailments graphically described, Claire still longs for daughter Esther, a standard-issue obnoxious teenager who's hardened with the knowledge of her power. A scene of her crouching over a fallen man, pouring poisoned words into his ear, is positively chilling. But what terrifies Esther's morally tough father, Sam, is that soon Esther will be an adult-and subject to the same horrors as her parents. When a quarantine is called, Sam and Claire prepare to leave, but Claire collapses, and Sam must go on alone; he ends up in a creepy laboratory where a cure for language toxicity is being sought. What keeps him going? The vision of his family. VERDICT Highly recommended, though not for those wanting easy thrills; demanding writer Marcus wants us to think. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Teenagers can be described as toxic, no doubt about it. But in Marcus' speculative tale, teens are literally poisoning their parents each time they speak. This ingenious and provoking premise enables the boldly imaginative Marcus (Notable American Women, 2001), recipient of a remarkable array of major literary awards, to explore the paradoxes of family and how the need to communicate can go utterly wrong. As this confounding, heartrending plague spreads from Jewish families to the general population, gravely ill adults flee; teens, who take to terrorizing adults with megaphones, are quarantined; and society breaks down. Claire and Sam, the ailing parents of virulently weaponized Esther, belong to a secret sect of forest Judaism, which involves listening to mysterious transmissions emitted from the earth. Their tiny, sylvan synagogue becomes the focus of an aggressive stranger, who directs a grim work camp hastily assembled to find a cure for this catastrophic affliction at any cost. Marcus conducts a febrile and erudite inquiry into the threat of language, offering incandescent insights into ancient alphabets and mysticism, ostracism and exodus, incarceration with Holocaust echoes, and Kafkaesque behavioral science. Ultimately, the suspenseful, if excessively procedural, apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus' blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Language kills in Marcus's audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness. Outside Rochester, N.Y., Sam and Claire are a normal Jewish couple with a sullen teenage daughter, Esther. But Esther and other Jewish children begin to speak a toxic form of language, potentially deadly to adults: with "the Esther toxicity... in high flower," Sam watches in horror as the disease spreads to children of other religions, quarantine zones are imposed, and Claire sickens to the point of death. Heeding the advice of enigmatic prophet LeBov, Sam manufactures his own homemade defenses against his daughter's speech. But he and Claire are soon forced to abandon Esther in order to save themselves. The novel's first part plays like The Twilight Zone as a normal community becomes exposed to this mysterious infection. The second part reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare as Sam, separated from Claire, winds up in an isolated research facility, where he is put to work creating a new language that will be immune from the virus. The third part finds Sam living in the woods near his home, where he becomes a haunted creature out of a Yiddish folk tale. Marcus (Notable American Women) proves equally inspired in sketching Sam's underground religion of "forest Jews" who pray in individual huts and receive sermons via a special gelpack called a listener. Although characterization plays second fiddle to vision here, in LeBov, a silver-tongued, authoritarian, flimflam man, Marcus has retooled a classic American archetype. Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus's novel twists America's quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In Ben Marcus's novel, the sound of children's speech has become lethal. IN a career spanning nearly 20 years, Ben Marcus has written just four spare volumes: a story collection, two novels and a chapbook. Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic, this work has earned him critical praise and a small army of devoted fans. His prose is heavily metaphorical yet coolly ironic; it traffics in the language of scholarship, myth and history, and until now has forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative. Indeed, the pieces in "The Age of Wire and String" (1995) function more like prose poems than stories; their emotional impact is derived from their distinctive diction and syntax. The opener, "Argument," might serve as a map of Marcus's early career, with its stated goal of "cataloging a culture" through "an array of documents settling within the chief concerns of the society, of any society, of the world and its internal areas." The book's archness is both bracing and absurd; it attempts to reinvent story by repurposing, gleefully, the jargon ordinarily used to analyze it. "Notable American Women" (2002) is an allegorical black comedy featuring a cult of silence, creepy sexuality and literary doppelgängers of the author and his family. It is like an exploded diagram of itself, spilling out from between its covers and into the real world - even its epigraphs and cover blurbs feature quotations from its own characters. The story "The Father Costume" (2002), published as a chapbook with illustrations by Matthew Ritchie, is an extended exploration of metaphor, where words float on water or can be sewn out of thread, and time has physical substance. Since then Marcus has written short stories and essays, most notably a spirited defense of experimental fiction published in Harper's - but "The Flame Alphabet," his first new book in a decade, has the feel of an event. And though it is recognizably by the same author, it is also something of a surprise. It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller. In an alternate-reality America, adults are ailing. They're weak and feverish; their tongues seize up and their faces wither. The infectious vector, it turns out, is the speech of children. This sickness manifests first in Jews, who, in this anti-Semitic world, must worship secretly, in forested prayer huts, where quasi-organic electronic devices receive sermons through holes in the earth. It is inside one of these huts that Sam, the protagonist, and his wife, Claire, have conceived Esther, their now-teenage daughter and the agent of their present suffering. As society crumbles in a slow-motion Kristallnacht of pseudoscience and exile, Sam encounters the insidious red-haired Murphy, bearer of strange medicines and enemy of free speech. "An ultra-restricted language," he says, "operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this." He cites the Tower of Babel: "Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating." Meanwhile, diagnostic pamphlets appear, thick with biblical allusion, written by a researcher named LeBov. Through these enigmatic motifs, Marcus explores the notion of blame and its relationship to writing, Judaism and parenthood. For a while, mystery propels the story: What's the source of this illness? Why does it afflict only Jews? Who are Murphy and LeBov? Halfway through, though, the story falters. One person turns out to be another person, who turns out to be a third. The religious allegory fragments and stumbles; happenings seem random, opportunistic. Sam is captured and imprisoned in a language retraining camp, where he is forced to devise non-toxic forms of communication: "Did the language itself matter? . . . Did an ancient one need to be revived, or were we bound to invent a new one, avoiding the perils of every language that has heretofore existed, I wondered." He has sex with strangers, quotes philosophers and artists, and finds further plots coiled within the one that has already ensnared him. Eventually he hits upon a plan to recreate Hebrew writing: "It is said that the 22 Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly . . . would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child's play." This discovery, along with a serum derived from quarantined children, effects an escape, and an effort to reunite the family. "The Flame Alphabet," like Marcus's earlier works, is laden with metaphor; everything might mean something, but nothing is certain. It reads like a dream, complete with all the associative richness that comparison might suggest. Unfortunately, Marcus's borrowings from conventional narrative create an expectation of structural coherence that the book then declines to deliver. IN his more formally adventurous work, Marcus's sentences are thrilling; here, they sometimes feel excessive. Events are pointlessly recapitulated, or over-described. When we first meet Murphy, for instance, he is vomiting. Marcus shows us the scene again and again: "He was retching," "Now he was ill," "A pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth," "He was decorous in his expulsion." And the characters serve, too often, merely as vessels for ideas, Claire a repository for guilt, Esther an embodiment of anger. Murphy's villainy, too, is fixed; his role, established early on, never changes. Instead of development, we see only a subtle rearranging of static elements. Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent, but "The Flame Alphabet" doesn't fulfill its own promise as a hybrid of the traditional and experimental. At one point, Sam recalls the prayer hut: "Claire and I always got excited that we might hear a story instead of a sermon." Readers with the same hope for this book may find it vexing; it's a strange and impressive work, but in the end, it's mostly sermon. J. Robert Lennon's books include the story collection "Pieces for the Left Hand" and the novel "Castle." His new novel, "Familiar," will be published this fall.

Notable American Women, 2002, etc.). Had something bitten them while they slept by the ocean? That would explain, think Sam and Claire, their itchy skin and lethargy. But how come Esther, their 14-year-old daughter who'd napped beside them, is doing just fine? Then a pattern emerges in their upstate New York community. Adults are getting sick while kids stay healthy. The symptoms include shortness of breath, facial hardening and immobilized tongues, all caused by children's speech. Narrator Sam and Claire belong to an obscure Jewish sect. Their synagogues are two-person huts that enclose holes for transmission cables; there they listen to anti-language sermons that advocate a freakish quietism. The virus is its horrifying, unintended actualization. A prominent medical researcher, LeBov, blames "the toxic Jewish child." His canard doesn't goose the plot, but the novel's first, better half is nonetheless compelling. The panic spreads. Sam and Claire are victims twice over. They have pampered their beloved Esther. Now the teenager turns on them, maliciously spraying them (and others) with words. Marcus is at his best evoking their physical decline and helpless unconditional love for their brat--warmth amid the ashes. In time there's a mandatory evacuation order for adults; children are quarantined. On their way out of town, officials detach the desperately sick Claire from her anguished husband. In the novel's second half, Sam is a researcher in a medical lab, tasked with creating "a new language to outwit the toxicity." This is dull and clinical, though the appearance of the sharp-tongued anti-Semite LeBov perks things up momentarily; he points out that Jewish researchers are needed for their "conductive" skills. A short final section has Sam back at his hut coping, barely, with a grim post-apocalyptic world. Marcus has imagination to spare, but the religious Jewish theme is not a comfortable fit with a raging epidemic, and the suspense ebbs away. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.