The Age of Loneliness

Starred review from April 22, 2024
Marris, a creative writing professor at the University of Buffalo, debuts with a shattering collection that meditates on the sense of loss and isolation caused by humanity’s estrangement from the natural world. “There’s a strength—a stubbornness—to being lonely, to insisting on the importance of what’s no longer there. To wonder why you never hear a certain bird anymore,” Marris writes in the plaintive “Lost Lake,” which explores her grief over environmental destruction and the death of her nature-loving father. His memory also looms large in “Cancerine,” where the author tenderly recalls finding horseshoe crabs while exploring Connecticut’s brackish marshes with him and details how human exploitation of the arthropods (they were used as fertilizer in the 1800s and continue to be harvested for medical testing and bait) has threatened their survival. Other selections contemplate the uncanny emptiness of Mcity, a 32-acre ersatz town built in Ann Arbor, Mich., to test self-driving cars, and lament how even ostensibly restored wildlife areas carry traces of past pollution (she recalls spoiling a park picnic by warning her friends against eating the wild cherries, reminding them the park was located on a former dump). Marris combines personal and natural history to potent effect, and the elegiac prose renders palpable the distance that modernity has placed between humans and the environment. Readers will be awed. Agent: Ian Bonaparte, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

June 15, 2024
A writer and translator explores the relationship between human presence and place. Some call the current era the Anthropocene, emphasizing the way humans have altered the planet, but others call it the Eremocene, or "the Age of Loneliness." For Marris, this second name is especially apt because of all the manmade ecological losses that are occurring globally on a daily basis. In the essay "Cancerine," she observes that horseshoe crabs, once prized for the nitrogen-rich shells farmers use as fertilizer and later for the blood scientists use to test for vaccine safety, have slowly declined in Long Island Sound. "Is it possible," she asks, "to pinpoint the moment an ecosystem becomes a stage set in a vast passion play among people, and if so, can this anthropocentrism be reversed?" As we manage to carry on in a hostile world, while the living things that have helped us survive go extinct, we have all grown increasingly lonely. The Earth itself--the air, the water, the land--also bears the brutal mark of human predation. Airplanes compete for space with birds in the sky, "ingesting" them while most air travelers, isolated from this truth in lonely, human-centric worlds, remain largely unaware of the damage caused. All over the world, natural spaces, like the once dangerously polluted Love Canal area near where the author lives, carry traces of old toxicities. Yet as Marris comes to understand in her essay "The Echo," despite being mostly abandoned for the suffering it caused, the land--which is gradually being restored--is still worthwhile not just for the hope of planetary healing and human redemption it offers, but also for the promise of home and the "closeness [and] company" of others, which are fundamental to living a meaningful life in a changing world. A satisfyingly complex and profound collection.

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