• "I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified — he makes the word new and thus the world.”

    George Saunders

  • "Ben Marcus has been accused of redesigning the ordinary sentence, of emptying words of their meaning and injecting them with new, of treating grave matters (such as family and humankind in general) with farcical disrespect, and of blowing away traditional narrative structures with a diabolical wind. And all this may be true. But for those who would describe this work as fantastic, surreal, or anti-real, I can only say that this is Ohio exactly as I remember it. Jane Dark was my fourth grade teacher.”

    Robert Coover

  • "Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.”

    Gilbert Sorrentino

BEN MARCUS

October 26, 2004

Ben Marcus is the author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String. Most recently he has edited The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. He teaches at Columbia.

Introduction

Throughout Ben Marcus’ fiction, it is evident that his gaze as a writer is focused as much on how we go about telling a story, as the story itself. We are not just living, he seems to reflect in his books, but building our lives from thimbles as much as anecdotes, from tin cans as much as gene pools, from crumpled newspaper as much as the conversations we share each day. We are always performing and transforming, it seems, as we project our lives forward to make something of them, make something in language about them—and the task he seems to have embraced in his fiction, is to investigate how we negotiate that slippery process by documenting the many and sundry artifacts that make up a life.

It’s not easy work. After all, in Marcus’ collection The Age of Wire and String—a book that might be described as an ironic "how-to" or "instruction" manual with chapters titled "Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife," "Food Costumes of Montana," "Dog, Mode of Heat Transfer in Barking" and finally, one that might be dear to all our hearts in Buffalo, "Continuous Winter, in Law"—the narrator notes:

"the outer gaze always alters the inner thing…by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed."

It might be said then that Marcus’ fiction is often as much about what we try to see, as what we cannot see, or better yet, what we might see if we just looked hard enough or specifically through his eyes. After all, as Robert Coover notes about Notable American Women—a novel about a cult of women who practice silence and use protagonist Ben Marcus in their breeding experiments—"For those who would describe this work as fantastic, surreal, or anti-real, I can only say that this is Ohio exactly as I remember it. Jane Dark was my fourth grade teacher."

If Marcus’ collection suggests, then, that worlds can be woven together from nothing but wire and string, his novel pushes the Ben Marcus "life project" still further to suggest to all of us that there are realities that have yet to be plumbed, cultures and religions still unmined, that there is a vast landscape—dark, perverse, hilarious—that we can still explore because it is only one word, one world, away.

But then again, to quote "Michael Marcus" ("Ben Marcus’" father in NAW): "How can one word from Ben Marcus’ rotten filthy heart be trusted?"