Ben Marcus' hot novel, The Flame Alphabet,' explores a nightmare about communication

What if you became sick - violently, seriously ill - everytime your children uttered a word?

That's the nightmare world unleashed by Ben Marcus in his stunner of a novel The Flame Alphabet (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95), due out Tuesday.

The novel tells the story of Sam and Claire, an ordinary Jewish couple from Rochester, N.Y., who realize to their horror that the mysterious illness that has gripped them is caused by their daughter, Esther.

Or, rather, by her words.

"They realize that the language of their daughter - the very speech of their own daughter - is making them sick," says Marcus, who will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library (in a double bill also featuring Shalom Auslander, who will discuss his book Hope: A Tragedy).

"Before long, a global pandemic breaks out: Children's language is toxic to all adults," says Marcus. "Some adults stay with their children, some just abandon them."

Told from Sam's point of view, the novel explores the bonds that hold families together, says Marcus, 44, who lives in Manhattan with his wife of 10 years, fellow novelist Heidi Julavits, and their two children, Solomon, 3, and Delia, 7.

"The book is about the outrageous demands of parenthood," he says, "and the joy and love of a family and, in turn, the vulnerability of it."

Sam finds himself in a nightmare scenario out of A Clockwork Orange, when some of the kids band together and ride around town chattering loudly into megaphones to wreak vengeance on all the adults who made them go to school or eat Brussels sprouts.

This is one of many shocks in The Flame Alphabet, an exciting page-turner that also manages to explore, with rigor and wit, some heady issues about the nature of language, family, community - even religion - using science-fiction conventions.

Received with rapturous reviews, The Flame Alphabet is the most accessible and fully realized of Marcus' novels.

It's a departure of sorts for the Chicago native, whose previous books, incuding The Age of Wire and String (1995) and Notable American Women (2002), are experimental, nonlinear exercises that mix and match genre conventions as a way to explore how language works.

"I wanted to write a much more suspenseful and, dare I say, gripping narrative that had a lot of momentum," says Marcus, who has taught for a decade at Columbia University's graduate creative-writing program.

It may be a depature from Marcus' previous work, but The Flame Alphabet retains his overriding preoccupation with the power of language - and with how language is used by those in power.

"To me, language is almost a physical substance. It can change us biologically," says Marcus.

"Someone takes controlled substances to feel [things] in a heightened way, or change the way they feel. Language also can do that. We read novels to make us feel different, to transport us."

The Flame Alphabet finds its hero, Sam, helpless in the face of a growing crisis that can't be contained by the authorities despite their assurances and despite platitudes uttered by politicians.

Things go from bad to worse when the pandemic begins affecting adults.

"I wondered what people would be like, what a society would be like if no one could communicate," says Marcus.

Not too hard to imagine: It's a virtual apocalypse that threatens to collapse all social structures.

"No one knows what is going on with this language plague," Marcus says, including the cadres of men and women in white lab coats in our hospitals, universities, and pharmacies, and on TV, people who have always made us feel life is under control.

"I think what I was exploring was the vulnerability we conceal in the face of people who call themselves experts," says Marcus. "There is a real lure to expertise . . . and a very real danger that its authority is abused."

Sam's frustration impels him to search for his own cure. A total amateur, he mixes and matches chemicals, medicines, and potions.

"I wanted to ask: Just how confident are we that we can work things out for ourselves if the professionals weren't there?" says Marcus.

Sam's quest for a cure takes a particularly mystical and Kafkaesque turn in the latter half of the novel, when he abandons his scientific dabbling and tries to create a new language.

"Is there a language we can use safely?" Marcus asks rhetorically.

The answer is proferred by a mystical sect Sam encounters. The answer is no.

"I did a great deal of research in Jewish and Christian mysticism," says Marcus, who describes himself as a secular Jew.

"In Kabbalah, there is a wonderful idea that if you find yourself understanding God, then you are wrong. It is only when you are completely confused and disoriented that you might be in the vicinity of the divine."

The Flame Alphabet is something of a wonder, a shattering trip that takes us from a family crisis discussed around the kitchen table, to the bonds that create community, to the nature of God.

or tirdad@phillynews.com.