The Flame Alphabet

Starred review from September 26, 2011
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.

November 15, 2011
Beware of children--their language will kill you. That's the premise of this offbeat disaster novel from Marcus (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.

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August 1, 2011

In Marcus's bizarre new world, children have developed speech that is literally killing their parents. When Sam flees his daughter with wife Claire, already on her deathbed, he's pulled off the road and ushered into a government-run laboratory where scientists are trying to reintroduce nonlethal forms of speech. But the subjects are dropping like flies, and Sam determines to make a run for it and reunite with his family, regardless. A scarily off-kilter look at communication, control, and the desperate nature of love, this daring book is getting a reasonable push--a 35,000-copy first printing and a six-city tour.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2011
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)