rereading "Cold Little Bird" by Ben Marcus"

Ben Marcus' short story Cold Little Bird appeared in New Yorker magazine in 2015. I was taken by the quality of the writing and nature of the characters he described. Ben Marcus whose work is both mordant and funny, both experimental and conventional, as this story, one of his more accessible. It is taut and compact, complex and scary.

The story is of a preadolescent boy named Jonah and his parents. Jonah suddenly, so it seems, withdraws and rejects his parents. Withdrawn, he becomes the titular "cold little bird". Once a sweet, doted upon child he now is distant, caustic and oppositional. Parents see a change while to everyone else in his life, he is the same sweet boy. Mercilessly, he blocks any attempt to communicate Finally, almost sadistically and rather creatively, he reads anti-Semitic literature, that he knows his father will find outrageously objectionable. Of course it is just the thing that would drive his father to fury. Mother takes on a concerned but justifying tone--excusing the son's behavior as developmental while castigating the angry husband, possibly out of stupidity but also in some strange alliance with the child. Finally, the boy hints that he may report the father for child abuse for not heeding his new rule of no hugs. They head to a pompous psychiatrist, and that session is a disaster.

Many reviews of Cold Little Bird have appeared on the web. Some liken it to a developmental horror story--a kind of "Exorcist" or "Damien" that describes the changes of adolescence. A truly oppositional child can seem like a demon. If they are bright and articulate, those newfound linguistic powers can be cruel. If they are socially adept they may form alliances that further mock the parents, and even their continued high regard from teachers and other parents serves as a form of relational aggression. Further, to Jonah, to burnish the parent's rejections, he becomes solicitous to an adoring younger brother. To the rest of the world, he is good as gold, nothing has changed. The dialogue shows Marcus's ability to invent exquisite verbal cruelty--the use of language to insinuate, to irritate, to insult obliquely, and to hurl knotty linguistic insults that are hard to respond to. This is related to the them of his book, The Flame Alphabet. Jonah has an instinctively clever way of rousing rage in his dad--and then the emotions are turned judo like back on the hapless dad.  

Jonah is maddeningly logical. Some reviewers have suggested he may be on the spectrum. Not really. From his perch of detachment, he simply can form and hurl verbal barbs. 

   

Mom distances herself from the father, blaming him, regarding him as reactive and harmful.  Her willingness to be empathic with her son has a veneer of parental helpfulness but invalidates the father's (and reader's) sense that the child is now the aggressor, and is not easily going to relinquish that role. The parents are in for a long haul. .

The escalating sadism of the story reminded me somewhat of D. H. Lawrence's The Prussian Officer. In that short story the protagonist, a Prussian officer, behaves ever more cruelly, abusively, and sadistically to a naïve and genial assistant. Nothing precipitates the climb to sadistic heights. The taboo underneath this story is uncertain--possibly the modern belief in the unfailing innocence of childhood, and Marcus has in this and other stories become the new Freud in demolishing this innocence.

August 31, 2019