i’m only halfway through this, and would love it even if i didn’t have a child, but the empathy the Flame Alphabet has for the shock of the absolute difficulty of parenting is unlike anything i’ve ever read. Parenthood becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of having any belief concretely verified in any attempt at faith or love in or of something or someone. In my reading thus far, i would almost be convinced that language is evil, if not for the fact that it is the medium for Marcus’s tale–a tricky meta-challenge (negative allegory)  to the dismissal it receives from the narrative.

Excerpts:

“They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness.  Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship, even when they try to tell you.  To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion” (42).

“The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against I statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic, attack sentences, that sort of thing, were probably not LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this” (63).

“This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us.  Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language…. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is.  And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause” (67).

See what i mean?