Age of Wire and String: Stories

Novel in every sense of the word, "The age of Wire and String" is a work that transcends the label of "experimental fiction". While the book is difficult, and at times frustrating in its redistribution of physics, it is a work of unerring discipline in that it maintains, comments upon and eloquently captures its own internal logic. With all the elegance of an anthropology textbook, and all of the emotion of an instruction manual, Marcus' prose somehow manages to be poignant and insightful. The book is autobiographical in only the most ghostly of ways; Marcus and members of his family emerge as pieces of the earth, ancient tools, scriptures and units that serve rudimentary functions in every day life. For anyone who loves physics and literature, reading this book is a necessity. Marcus, I believe, is one of the most talented of our contemporary writers,and this is a book that could benefit from academic scrutiny in classes of literature, physics, or anthropology. The term "avant-guarde" is meant to refer to people who are ahead of their time, and not merely eccentric or subversive, and Ben Marcus is one of the few writers who writes with enough clarity, precision, and exactitude to be genuinely accredited with that title. This book is so precise in its ruminations on an alternative and sometimes baffling set of physics that it greatly elucidates our own world in comparison, which is supposedly the ultimate goal of literature. Oh, and did I mention how fiercely witty Ben Marcus is? This was a joy to read.

Like those other young cult leaders John D'Agata and David Wallace (before his popularity at least), Marcus exhibits a rare talent that actually allows him to get away with some of the absurd flights that his formal inventions take. Nothing in his generation of fiction comes close to this aching collection of longing.

I cherish this book. I bought it a long time ago, when it was a Knopf hardcover, from a little bookstore now defunct. Structurally this is one of the few books that has attempted this format. I mean, this isn't quite a novel, not quite stories. In a sense, this book could be read in any direction, front to back, middle towards the outsides, etc. It has a hypertextual feel, to use a fancy word.I'm really enthusiastic about structure. I'm always thrilled when a book comes out that seems to share my enthusiasm.Not many books have done this well. Robert Coover's short story The Babysitter is a common example, mainly because it is such a great story.Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch develops a similar structure: There are three or four different orders in which to read the chapters. It is a sad story of two lovers.James Kelman's newest novel, the powerful book Translated Accounts is another example of this structure.What makes Ben Marcus's book so unique besides this shared, rare structure, is the sudden, jarring ways in which he uses language. Everything is folded and shorn, each word teeting on the edge of nonsense, like the lyrical antics of Dr Seuss. There is a creeping sense of autobiography behind Age of Wire & String that I have heard will be further explored in his next novel Notable American Woman, due out in January, I think. The cover is to be designed by the same guy who did the redesigns of Rick Moody's books, so I suspect it'll be a spanking good-looking book.

"There is no larger task than that of cataloging a culture," writes Marcus, "particularly when that culture has remained willfully hidden to the routine in-gazing practiced by professional disclosers, who, after systematically looting our country of its secrets, are now busy shading every example of so-called local color into their own banal hues." Marcus' own compulsively secretive catalog guts our conceptions of American culture like a lit match held to a tinder-dry house. In chapters titled with emotional primitives -- Sleep, The House, Animal, Persons -- short treatises on such worn elements of our daily experience as "Automobile, Watchdog" invert those objects into their otherworldly counterparts: "Girl burned in water, supplementary terms 'help' or X, basic unit of religious current." Like all master stylists, Marcus is something of a guerrilla tactician. His self-declared task is the re-invention of the wheel, and the weapons he brings to bear on the problem include the modes of writing used in histories, personal narratives, and product manuals. The chapter on God includes such metaphysical redefinitions as "HEAVEN. Area of final containment. It is modeled after the first house. It may be hooked and slid and shifted. The bottom may be sawed through. Members inside stare outward and sometimes reach." This same neutrally-toned, semantically dissociated language is frequently used to disguise charged accounts of childhood experience -- warming his hands in winter by the "burning ball," an older brother's asthma attack, the mysterious girl called Jennifer who causes "partial blindness in regard to hands." Often the disguise is complete and we have absolutely no idea what Marcus is trying to convey; but the intoxicated music of his syllables compels us up through those elided sections of the work toward a transformed vision, vertiginous in its clarity, of those things we hold to be most true.

sometimes i get a little mad at the world and i feel i am ready to experience it in a new way. so i pick this book up and one passage will stay with me for days. good food for the brain. as good as a frozen banana and nutella. with words like pooter, who could resist a trip into the madness of the author's peception?