Special diets are also involved, and at one point Marcus finds himself as the unwilling sire for the entire cult. Marcus describes elaborate devices designed to catch or stifle motion and psychological conditioning procedures designed to cure the women (and him) of the need for speech or emotion. This entails a number of rather complex processes and experiments involving cloth that holds words, water that absorbs experience and oral communication (what little there is of it) with an emphasis on vowels over consonants. The cult, called the Silentists, is led by a woman named Jane Dark, who directs them in their efforts to eliminate all motion, all speech and all feeling. The rest of the novel is Ben’s account of his existence before adulthood as shaped by his mother and the cult of women she has taken into their Ohio home. The novel opens with an angry letter ostensibly written by his father, urging us to ignore the lies that Ben will tell us, and it closes with a piece attributed to his mother, chastising his father for Ben’s shortcomings.

Unfortunately, Marcus’ inventiveness seems to be a double-edged sword, which means that his contribution is limited to an intellectual realm in which “hugely emotional” reactions have no place.īen Marcus is actually the protagonist of this novel, and he tells the story of his (entirely fictional) upbringing, for which the description “trying to suppress all feelings” should be taken quite literally. But although this slim volume is not an easy read, it would be unfair to simply deny Marcus credit for his sincere attempt to “invent new uses of language.” If the premise of fiction is that an exploration of what was never real can inform our understanding of what is and might be real, then Notable American Women certainly has an intriguing contribution to offer.

Notable American Women demands full attention in order to make any sense of the bizarre world it describes. Established authors like George Saunders have sung its praises, and yet they are singing praises about a book that many readers will probably never finish.

The novel, however, is anything but commonplace. There’s something somewhat conventional about the story line-it’s about an American family about whom bad things happen-and I wanted to produce strong feelings through this story of a family trying to suppress all feelings.” This description seems to suggest that Marcus’ new novel, Notable American Women, addresses a not uncommon subject in American fiction. Ben Marcus, a writing instructor at Columbia University and author of a collection of short stories (The Age of Wire and String, 1995) wanted his first novel to be “hugely emotional.” He told The Crimson, “I didn’t want it to simply be a clever manipulation of language.

Notable American Women by Ben Marcus