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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Structural Rarity, October 23, 2001
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It makes deeper sense than it seems, July 20, 1998
Language is essentially arbitrary-- a collection of sounds we make with our mouths and little squiggles of circles and lines-- and from this mess of linguistic scratching we find meaning and ultimately create a bit of identity for ourselves, our families, and our communities. In "The Age of Wire and String" Ben Marcus has turned this relationship between humanity and language inside out. In a tone that is in turns technically earnest and sweet, Marcus describes our world as it must appear to an alien race visiting earth. The incredible feat in this collection of "stories" is that while it seemingly "makes no sense," some sense does, in fact, bubble up through the intricate narrative tangle. By lumping his stories together in sections such as "Animal," "Persons," and "The House," (with glossaries that further confound the reader), Marcus gives us impressions of physical reality as though they are being experien! ced in utero; there's a primal, pre-historical feel to many passages, even the ones that make vague references to the twentieth century. Like the more rambling works of Donald Barthelme or the Richard Brautigan of "In Watermelon Sugar," what keeps you reading "The Age of Wire and String" is the author's seeming incomprehension that you won't understand a single word he says, which makes for some compelling reading indeed.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Urban Renewal--the Encyclopedia Domestica, December 14, 1997
"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.
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