Take a photo of a barcode or cover
matthewcpeck 's review for:
Notable American Women
by Ben Marcus
Ben Marcus's debut novel defies convention in form, style, and content. There's family ("Ben Marcus" and his parents) at the center, living on a farmhouse-turned-compound in a dystopian Akron. Mrs. Marcus has come under the influence of a visionary cult leader named Jane Dark, who espouses a philosophy of extreme self-denial where absolute silence and stillness are seen as the ideal mode of existence. Mr. Marcus, meanwhile, has been exiled to an underground prison cell in the back forty, while young Ben has mandated sexual intercourse with a Dark's female 'Silentist' followers for breeding purposes.
This isn't presented in any linear, storylike fashion, though. The book starts with an introduction/caveat from the father, and it ends with a letter from the mother. Between these are three sections narrated by "Ben", and they range, stylistically, from instruction manual to almanac to memoir and beyond, immersing the reader in the book's bizarre universe. This is a world where human language can act as a physical substance that can bludgeon, or be absorbed into cloth. As in his previous collection "The Age Of Wire And String", Marcus experiments with English, creating his own jargon and endowing people, objects and weather with properties that that don't rightly belong. It's not just whimsy, though: it's written calmly and clearly. Sometimes it made me chuckle out loud, especially at the 'instructions' for reading the book, near the start (it makes more sense if recited through megaphone under moonlight, but reading in a German accent will "induce crouching"). And then it's deeply disturbing, haunted, like the recurring saga of Ben's sister, the subject of a family experiment that has her called by different names over a period of time, and shedding a husk of skin at the end of each interval.
The longish ending chapter, written as a final letter from mother to father, has a markedly different tone than the rest of the novel, and manages to be genuinely heartbreaking, if not as blazingly original and weirdly fun as the preceding pages. And it really is an addictive read, once you acclimate to its rhythms. When I was deep into the book, the picayune details of my daily life stood out with a new strangeness: instructions posted on a fax machine seemed like an incantation, and the fact that my work PC reads my fingerprint seemed suddenly frightening.
"Notable American Women" reminded me variously of Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien and William Gass, but it's truly an anomaly. It made 'normal' novels seem so stubborn and narrow-minded, and I enthusiastically recommend it to those that appreciate the varied wonders of the English language.
This isn't presented in any linear, storylike fashion, though. The book starts with an introduction/caveat from the father, and it ends with a letter from the mother. Between these are three sections narrated by "Ben", and they range, stylistically, from instruction manual to almanac to memoir and beyond, immersing the reader in the book's bizarre universe. This is a world where human language can act as a physical substance that can bludgeon, or be absorbed into cloth. As in his previous collection "The Age Of Wire And String", Marcus experiments with English, creating his own jargon and endowing people, objects and weather with properties that that don't rightly belong. It's not just whimsy, though: it's written calmly and clearly. Sometimes it made me chuckle out loud, especially at the 'instructions' for reading the book, near the start (it makes more sense if recited through megaphone under moonlight, but reading in a German accent will "induce crouching"). And then it's deeply disturbing, haunted, like the recurring saga of Ben's sister, the subject of a family experiment that has her called by different names over a period of time, and shedding a husk of skin at the end of each interval.
The longish ending chapter, written as a final letter from mother to father, has a markedly different tone than the rest of the novel, and manages to be genuinely heartbreaking, if not as blazingly original and weirdly fun as the preceding pages. And it really is an addictive read, once you acclimate to its rhythms. When I was deep into the book, the picayune details of my daily life stood out with a new strangeness: instructions posted on a fax machine seemed like an incantation, and the fact that my work PC reads my fingerprint seemed suddenly frightening.
"Notable American Women" reminded me variously of Haruki Murakami, Flann O'Brien and William Gass, but it's truly an anomaly. It made 'normal' novels seem so stubborn and narrow-minded, and I enthusiastically recommend it to those that appreciate the varied wonders of the English language.