Notable American Women: A Novel

A surreal manifestation of the brilliant, twisted mind of Ben Marcus, who powers his prose with the dark heart of a poet. Reading him is kind of like meeting a gentle someone on the street who looks you in the eye and tells you he's going to eat your pets. This is where modern fiction wanted to go all along, a book that will awaken a part of the brain you didn't realize you had lost. It is so powerful and illuminating that you almost forget it might be the funniest book you've ever read. Just for fun: as you read, occasionally imagine the author's parents reading this. Imagine him explaining to them that the parents in the book are just fictional characters.

This gorgeously writtenl mind-bender of a novel is not for people who are afraid to think. Read it and savor the delicate, bracing flavor of brainpops made of cognitive salami. Masticate crunchy kernels of nostalgia and sadness. Treat yourself by decoding this codex of mysterious time-loops and emotional wordplay. Dress yourself in bacon. Challenge yourself. Read it and weep.

Mr. Marcus seems to be a little misunderstood and rightly so; he is not completely interested in being completely understood as far as I can tell. Notable American Women by Ben Marcus is probably not for everyone (and yes, some books are or should be). First, if you are interested in notable American women, this book isn't about that. If you are happy by nature or genuinely miss diagramming sentences, you may not like this book. I mean that with no innuendo. The book is boldly, perhaps brazenly, creative, cynical and hilarious. But if the near-incessant cynicism is unpalatable to you, it simply won't be that funny. For me, when this book is not completely on the mark nailing Skinnerian human nature (not nailing it to anything, mind you, just hammering it), Marcus' use of language is enough to completely engage me. This book is a matter of words more so than most books. There is great insight, humanity and humor here (I laughed out loud often), but your enjoyment, I think, will ultimately depend on your patience with a creative and relatively unrestrained lyrical prose that is more purely portrayed in Marcus' The Age of Wire and String. In my opinion, a plot helps, so I enjoyed this book more than I did Wire and String. There is talk of Notable American Women being science fiction, I dunno, maybe, sorta, sure. I give it 5 stars because that's how much I liked it.

This is not an easy book. It is a difficult book. It is not a conventional book. It is not a conventionally unconventional book. It is challenging. "Hey," it says, "want a fight?" It is not for people who like happy endings or, for that matter, endings. Ben Marcus's prose glistens darkly, heavy and slug-like, subtle, sublime and subliminal. You may have to read it aloud to yourself to understand its full weight. If you do this in public, you will be arrested.If you thought "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" redefined the scope of what a novel could be and threw down the gauntlet to modern writers, then you are unlikely to get beyond the sixth page of Notable American Women. But you're welcome to try.Not as good as The Age of Wire and String, but the moon is not as good as the sun.

Pablo Neruda once said that anyone who doesn't read Julio Cortazar is doomed; I say the same thing about Ben Marcus. I heard him read from this book long ago but he wiped my memory and was dead anyway, at the time. Now, risen from the ashes of genius, he has come to send us over the edge. If you recently wrote a favorable review of a psychological novel, stop wasting your time on this one. Throw yourself onto the sharp bones of postmodernity's corpse and read through the pain. Only in oblivion will you understand.