BOOK - Ben Marcus's "Notable American Women"

Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women takes the linguistic ideas of Derrida, couples them with the technical prose of early Borges, and then minces a psychotic philosophy into novel form (chopped up is the only way it’ll fit). The result is accordingly a minute, elegant study that’s crazy, often verbose, and extremely difficult. It is, ultimately, a harmless (and therefore pointless) postmodern jaunt into—where else?—Emotional Dysfunction.

Marcus uses a brazen verbal deconstruction and a descriptive maximism, and at times he makes English nothing more than a Clockwork plaything. In his rural Ohio, people spend their time being incarcerated in “socks” (or worse, buried under the earth, bombarded with words), drinking “behavior water” (for feelings are merely “an absence or surplus of water in the body”), or coolly regarding the prospects of their family slash project’s goal to “launch the child” into the world.

These are amusing concepts, pieced together by a real intellect and used with an even more intelligent wit, but they consume the plot, the characters, and the momentum, until Notable American Women lives only as a screed on the behavior and beliefs of a fictional cult (the Silentists), book-ended by two monologues from each of the narrator’s parents. The narrator, incidentally, is a retarded, soft, stilted child named Ben Marcus (think Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, only nowhere as endearing). As for his parents’ sections: if you were to read only those sixty-odd pages (out of the full 240), you’d more than understand the fundamental point of the novel: our parents shape the world. The rest of the book only severs the reader’s emotional connection to anyone in it, and is a profound waste of time, somewhere between an alternative history and a technical manual. Neither realism nor magical realism, Notable American Women is pure mechanism, a clever artifice, dot dot dot. It is, fittingly, an oxymoron: brilliantly dull.

Here’s an example:

“1979. Jane Marcus occurs in Deep Ohio. She has an accurate walking style and can converse in one language. She sleeps lying down, and uses a filter called ‘hair’ to attract her mates. The small people in her house call her ‘Mother,’ and she answers them by collapsing the tension in her face, a release that passes for listening.”

This is a near perfect paragraph; it is strikingly original, deviously clever, and very well put. However, it occurs in the midst of a recurring chapter called “Dates,” which lists various events in this alternative history, none of which really tie into anything or even really tell much of a story. Rebellions are begun and quashed in the same paragraph, and there’s no personal investment or payoff for digesting these not-quite-informative fragments.

The other recurring chapter, even worse, is called “Names”: it is a study of the power of various names, and the effect of each name when it is used on the narrator’s sister (she dies, eventually, from the name Mary, and we are warned that the name “Lisa . . . is more dangerous than the words ‘fuck’ or ‘fag’ or ‘dilch’”). The other 12 chapters are usually as redundant or off-topic as these two, though they at least mention Ben Marcus (the character) once in a while. The meta-referential sections, like “Shushing the Father,” have momentum for brief moments (long enough to describe how Jane Dark, the figurehead of the Silentist movement, installed herself at the Marcus home), and then, like the stillness-obsessed Silentists themselves, all motion ceases. We get lengthy nonsense treatises like this:

“The chief way to determine the gratuitous bone content in the female head (shabble) is to tap its surface with a facial mallet over a period of a month or more, using a mallet style more like worrying than actual smashing. Worrying the same area of the head with the mallet will eventually break down the excess bone matter, much of which is at the back or crown of the head, and it will pass naturally from the body, through the tears or saliva or sweat. Any bones that can be shed this way are not important to the life of the body, but are a disposable shell that simply needs to be cracked free and passed.”

For a book that mostly details how a cult is attempting to restore balance to nature by ceasing to disturb the wind with their bodies and (especially) their mouths, this is a lot of hot air. Yes, Marcus is remarkably inventive, and he’s got a made-up phrase for everything (sometimes even using familiar words), but you have to ask yourself what the point is of a hot-air balloon ride in the middle of a total eclipse. Wouldn’t you rather see something, even if you had to stay on the ground to do so? Marcus occasionally treats us to a bold descriptive phrase (“his gait is a stooping apology against motion”), but all too rarely.

If there are nuggets worth salvaging in Notable American Women, they are philosophical. Though the narrative is rarely serious, it does occasionally hit upon valid points: that “unbidden emotions” is a redundant phrase, for instance, or “that wherever I go, I do damage to what was there, by either killing or displacing it, that my presence encourages something else’s absence, that the term ‘my body’ implies no one else’s body, that by moving through air and time, I kill what was attempting to rest or habituate or hold steady. I remove that thing from its chosen space and effectively deny its reentry. I act as a warden of a prison in reverse, since wherever I am, no one else can be . . .”

In the limited story of Notable American Women, it is revealed that Ben Marcus (the character) has failed to fulfill his parent’s designs. Rather than rising through adversity, he has grown to accept it, and allows himself to be used and abused without remorse—rather, he finds the perverse pleasure of a mental masochist. It must equally be revealed to you, the reader, that Ben Marcus (the author) has failed to fulfill his own design (or that, in succeeding, he has alienated the reader). “We must,” as one of the Marcus’s writes, “always be prepared to admit when a theory is merely lyrical, but fucked in practice.” Ladies and gentlemen, the practice—this book—is fucked.