Notable American Women

( 4 )

Overview

Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and...
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Notable American Women

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More About This Book

Overview

Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Conceptual daring, deadpan humor and dizzying forays into allegory mark Marcus's first novel, the semi-science-fictional tale of a boy raised in a futuristic Ohio by his experimentalist parents and a sect of radical women Silentists. Ben Marcus, as the young protagonist is called, is made to swim in a "learning pond," drink "behavior water," follow the "Thompson Food Scheme" and take "language enemas." This regimen, designed by Silentist matriarch Jane Dark, is intended to purge Ben of all emotion, to "zero out [his] heart." Ben's father, who introduces the book with a bitter message to the reader, has been banished by the Silentists to a hole in the ground behind the house; Ben's mother, who bids the reader farewell at book's end, is a remorseless Silentist disciplinarian. Ben himself, taught to eschew all personal expression, tries to present a strictly utilitarian narrative of his upbringing weaving in a history of the Silentist movement, a disquisition on female names, and a manual of Silentist behavior and yet cannot help expressing the distress he feels in the smothering grasp of Jane Dark and her minions. Marcus (The Age of Wire and String) has crafted a dystopian novel in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984, with an overlay of 21st-century irony and faux na vet . Writing in off-kilter documentary-style prose laden with acronyms and neologisms, he often wanders into ponderous whimsicality, but stretches of the novel are inspired riffs on contemporary totems and anxieties. Ambitious and polished, if sometimes willfully opaque, this is an intriguing debut. (Mar. 12) Forecast: Anointed by the junior literary establishment as one of its brightest stars (sections of Notable American Women have already appeared in McSweeney's, Harper's and Tin House), Marcus will get major review coverage. A strong ad/promo campaign, a 10-city author tour and a clever, minimalist cover will help push this comfortably priced paperback original. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Those of us who were captivated by Marcus's debut, The Age of Wire and String, will welcome this latest addition to what is destined to become a very significant body of work. Marcus negotiates an esoteric though uniquely American literary terrain, mining such seemingly diverse sources as Gertrude Stein and Donald Barthelme. One of the virtues of this novel is that although it deals with issues of great significance such as gender, childhood, and coming of age, it is not easy to describe or paraphrase. Marcus reinvents the family drama in the story of a boy who grows up without feelings amidst a conspiracy of women obsessed with weather and silence. The book evokes an alternate reality revealing the dark side of our common history, an uncanny version of America that exists nowhere else but in Marcus's lyrical, abstract prose. This will be a difficult read for many, but it will surely stand the test of time as a genuinely important book. Recommended for all collections. Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
New Yorker
This deadpan dystopian novel documents the upbringing of a man who has been conditioned to have no emotions. In an alternate reality dominated by radical, powerful women known as the Silentists, the hero is subjected to laborious behavioral regimens including a regular "language fast," the elaborate "Thompson Food Scheme," and frequent swims in the "learning pond." But, with the heightened sensitivity of the dispossessed, he can't stop identifying the ways that life could be richer, and the result is like an anthropologist on hallucinogens. "I should be able to breathe without the sky suffering from lack of birds," he ruefully tells us. Although the novel's philosophical aims are at times frustratingly obscure, this "collision between satire and sadness," as the author has called it, is a dizzying reimagination of our relationship to language. If we're not at the epicenter of that collision, we're close enough so that the aftershock rattles our teeth.
Kirkus Reviews
Marcus follows up his extraordinary The Age of Wire and String (1995) with something of a disappointment. The verbal wizardry is still there, but the content has grown coquettish and slightened, no longer an engine sufficient to drive the whole. Things open with a hilarious monologue by the father of "Ben Marcus, the improbable author of this book": a father who is buried deep in the backyard of the family house somewhere in Ohio and who, after alluding to "the Silent Mothers," urges readers to "forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies." The Silent Mothers seem to be the women, led by Jane Dark, who have taken over the culture in Marcus's futuristic America, devoting themselves to language purification-maybe elimination-and to the de-emotionalizing of people, not least poor young and strange Ben Marcus, who suffers under and through many of their techniques. These include straitjackets, "witness water," rags that are chewed to absorb sounds and languages, spartan diets, wooden posts to be gnawed on, deliberate fainting, sundry brutalities, even a "language diaper." The book's narrative languor comes about in part because these group-women remain only anonymous ciphers; their motives are left unexamined while their doings are endlessly, albeit brilliantly, "described" in dazzling cascades of Marcus-language. The author's wit can still capture perfect tens, as in "Blueprint," about writing a novel such as this one ("The book should be closed so hard that a wind blows from it, gusting however feebly into whatever little world there is left"), or in the closing piece of anti-male virulence (by the "author's" mother): "The four-point stance is my favorite posture for men. It indicatesreadiness, disguises fear, and raises their bottoms above their heads, which more authentically prioritizes a man's body." But ennui can set in, not because subject, theme, or story are lacking, but because, amid these fountains of linguistic brilliance, the reader never really meets, gets inside of, or cares about the people. Dazzling, genius-driven-and, alas, often tedious.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375713781
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 3/12/2002
  • Series: Vintage Contemporaries Series
  • Edition description: VINTAGE
  • Pages: 256
  • Sales rank: 625,795
  • Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 7.80 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Ben Marcus is author of a novel, Notable American Women, to be published by Vintage in March, and a book of stories, The Age of Wire and String. Artspace Books will publish his collaboration with the painter Matthew Ritchie, The Father Costume.  He has published fiction in Harper's, McSweeney's, Grand Street, BOMB, Conjunctions, Fence and Tin House.

Before joining the faculty at Columbia University, where he is an assistant professor in the graduate writing program, he taught for three years at Brown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, an NEA in fiction, and two Pushcart prizes. He is the fiction editor of Fence magazine, and he has reviewed books and written essays for Time magazine, Feed, The Village Voice, and Salon.

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Read an Excerpt

Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.
Read More Show Less

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 4 )
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Sort by: Showing 1 – 5 of 4 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted May 4, 2002

    something completely different

    Notable American Women is a brilliant work that is both disturbing and hilarious. I couldn't put this down and will be a story that I read over and over and over

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 29, 2002

    He's trying....he really is...

    I have not read Ben's collection of short stories and was introduced to this book by a friend who heard an interesting review of it on NPR and gave it to me as a gift. Knowing nothing of the novel or its author, I found myself intrigued and confused through the first few chapters. And a traditional novel this is not.....but a collection of lists interspersed with fragments of a deranged childhood does not a good novel make. I found myself kind of bored with it. The concept for the novel and the women-empowered universe Marcus creates is astounding, but he doesn't DO anything with it, really. It either needed to be a short story (maybe novella) or stretched into something larger and grandiose so that the lists served a better purpose. Framing the novel with letters from the father and mother once again started out intriguing but ended up waxing Marcus-philosophical and created more stagnancy. I will, however, check out his collection of short stories. The way he looks at the world is utterly stupefying and entertaining, and whets my postmodern palette quite nicely!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 19, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 15, 2011

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted December 8, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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