★ 04/22/2024
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. (Aug.)
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.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A satisfyingly complex and profound collection.”—Kirkus Reviews
“These are essays of exquisite beauty. The Age of Loneliness is an exploration of landscapes, interior and exterior, and the ways they become imprinted with both wounding and healing. As Marris reckons with the loneliness of late capitalism, what emerges is a work of love and connection.”—Kathryn Savage
“In The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris guides readers through specific ecological histories of absence-making: displacement, climate crisis, and the vanishing of species. ‘The more a creature can tolerate, the more likely she is to end up alone in an increasingly hostile world,’ she observes of herself and of the wildlife around her. Marris’ critique succeeds through its specifically dystopian details: horseshoe crabs decimated for fertilizer, birds pulverized by airplanes, ‘words from the living world’ dropped from The Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of ‘database,’ ‘broadband,’ ‘committee.’ This thoroughly researched, passionate, and courageous autobiographical nonfiction debut also reminds us that even in Western New York State’s long history of toxicity, even in Buffalo-Niagara’s now-desolate Love Canal, we remain connected by quiet ecosystems of companionship and love.”—Susan Howe
“The Age of Loneliness is a stunning book that will become a close friend, and like all good friends, it will change the shape of our world. Both personal and planetary, roving in its intelligence and deeply rooted in its lyrical observation, Laura Marris has managed that trickiest of feats: she brings the past into the present and reminds us that we’re not yet alone. With prose that calls to mind the best in the tradition of nature writing, but with a voice which is also clearly, distinctly its own, Marris is the writer for our time.” —Daegan Miller
“The Age of Loneliness is a gorgeous, poignant guide to finding one another in a time of loss.”—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
“The Age of Loneliness calls to us from our era of extinction like a bird we thought we had lost. Laura Marris is a prophet whose patient song calls us to attention, to mercy, and finally, to each other.”—Tomás Q. Morín
2024-05-10
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.
