In The Flame Alphabet, language has become literally poisonous: the carrier, it is suggested, of a primal allergen. It starts with children: their voices, their statements, make their parents sicken horribly, distressingly, and ultimately fatally. (One of the creepiest symptoms is the way people's faces become smaller.) Marcus has, then, taken the avant garde preoccupations of his earlier work and deftly transferred them obliquely to the form of the dystopic sci-fi novel.
Only it's not quite that simple. There are other strands at work, one being Jewishness. The Jews in this book listen to sermons delivered from an underground network: beneath huts erected in woods or other secret places, singly, or in pairs, they hear a rabbi deliver an intentionally incomprehensible sermon through a "Jew hole". "Since the entire alphabet comprises God's name, [Rabbi] Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? … Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through.