Puzzlers that I will refrain from evaluating include 'On Not Growing Up,' about a 71-year-old child, and 'The Father Costume,' in which a character speaks 'a language called Forecast' consisting of sounds 'barked into a stippled leather box.' Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections, and the meaning of the seven stories in the second and fifth sections was beyond me, though I did appreciate their inventive language. Which I would never, ever, stoop to saying except in this paragraph that I'm writing right now. When he sees the ship’s welcome packet in his room, he thinks, “More people, for sure, read this welcome packet than had ever read any of books or stories.” Marcus captures the agony of teaching such a class, as the teacher tries to draw students into participation, fend off the overfriendly ones and balance the critiques of “the miniaturists,” the “your story starts here people” and the cop-out guy who insists that “this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it.” One of my favorites, the hilarious “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” is about a writer forced to teach a creative writing workshop on a cruise ship. All of these stories are sad, mysterious and beautiful. “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” is the touching and loopy story of a grown son who watches PBS with his elderly mother and interweaves his tangled anxieties and thoughts about life with her amusing analysis of the shows. In “Rollingwood,” a divorced father does his best to fend for his asthmatic son but can’t catch a break from his ex-wife, co-workers, boss or the world. In “The Dark Arts,” a young man suffering from an autoimmune disorder is in Germany undergoing experimental therapies that he can’t afford while staying in a creepy hostel and waiting for his girlfriend to show up as promised.

He’s seared in his extended family’s memory as a volatile screw-up. Bitter Paul notices that his family has erased all signs of him from his former room, which now looks like “a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking.” The genius of this story is that everyone reacts to Paul as if he once did something unspeakably horrible, but except for a few hints, we never learn what exactly this was. He has a good job, a wife and a baby, but his parents don’t know this, and when he mentions them, they don’t believe him because he’s lied so often in the past. In “What Have You Done?” a former sad-sack named Paul flies home to Cleveland for a family reunion. Those that gripped me most usually fell on the more realistic or funnier side of Marcus’ oeuvre.

Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus