Ben Marcus, Notable American Women ****

You've never read a book like this one. Do you like reading books that lack many of the crutches you usually rely on when reading — like a clear plot or the assurance that English words mean what you think they do? In its own words:

This book fails the Wixx/Byner comprehension test. This book eludes the Ludlow Plot Distribution Requirement Phase detection, which sleuths linear progression and character continuity in texts purporting to be fiction, of which only a small number actually are. By a wide margin, the book fails to meet the Coherency Requirement for Machinery Manuals as determined by the Ohio Clarity Foundation. The Reader Memory and Nostalgia Club, from Ohio, score this book a six out of a possible twenty-five points, yet this book induced 415 false memories or recollections from members of this club, who were prone to insert events from their own childhood into the plot of the book. The book required seven Simplification Batch Processes on the Language Cleaner Machine in order to render a legally binding one-hundred-word summary of its contents for the Annual Brochure of All Texts. (p 53)

Nonetheless, the book provides a unique perspective on the world and includes innumerable examples of elegant language. The narrator is a boy being raised on a farm in Ohio by a group of Silentists. Silentists are women who believe that the air turbulence created by speech is the cause of larger weather patterns and usually harms people and birds. They have invented their own "women's language" consisting solely of vowels (which are less violent than "the rough consonants and abrupt acoustical stops [of English], which inevitably result in the choppy air so prevalent whenever a man is speaking"). They have also developed techniques for suppressing emotions, which tend to promote the need for speaking and other violent movements. The ultimate goal for Silentists is to take the Promise of Stillness, vowing to stop speaking or moving completely. The narrator might be mentally handicapped, or it may be that he's just not suited to the Silentist regimen (being male as he is).

I enjoyed being constantly surprised by the ideas in the book, and by the creative use of language. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, perhaps because I did not eat the proper diet for appreciating the later chapters:

Food plays an important role in how words enter the body, and what these words come to mean.... Nuts, when consumed in bulk, create a grammar sympathy that is nearly off the map; almost any idiom can be understood through the regulated intake of these items.... Milk, on the other hand, if properly prepared and consumed, increases sensitivity to unusual locution, dialects, and accents, while flat bread baked in hot salt for a day can aid with problems of believability. (p 72)

I also liked the moments of tenderness than shone through the experimental prose:

If I had to take my thousands of desires and their millions of horribly unquenchable offshoots and digressions and contradictions,... and from these innumerable desires choose only one that I would forever have addressed whenever and wherever I liked, ... an instant satisfaction I could summon with a button, or the clap of my hands, that desire would be to have my head handled, to have it scratched and rubbed and cradled, washed with a soft rag, wiped dry if wet, moistened if dry, kissed, kissed, kissed forever, scratched, covered with fine stuff, the most expensive velvet, rich creams, discussed in discussion groups, analyzed by long-bodied men in coats, whispered about by girls from another country, never forgotten. ... If only my head could no longer suffer a boundary with other people's hands. (p 51)

Amen, brother!

By now you know whether you are interested in reading Notable American Women or would rather that the author "give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence" (p 12).