An Unbeaten Path 

Sometimes the best things confound easy description. Take Ben Marcus' The Age Of Wire And String. Even the cover is confused - the front says it's "stories" while the back describes it as both "An extraordinary first novel" and a "collection - part fiction, part handbook." This unclassifiability is the source of much of the book's pleasure; but it contains a strangeness that extends beyond mere genre categorization. 

So what is The Age Of Wire And String? 

Start with this from the book's first section, ARGUMENT: "This book is a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond. Let this be the first of many forays into the mysteries, as here disclosed but not destroyed."

What follows is that foray. 

About 20 years ago, Peter Greenaway made The Falls. A BBC-style mockumentary, the film explores the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) through a series of case profiles. Simultaneously somberly earnest and patently absurd, the 185 minute film is an anomaly: things unfold slowly; strange elements are introduced layer after layer; and the VUE itself is never explained. 

Like Greenaway's layering of biographies, Marcus presents a world which is close to our own but yet is also uncannily different. Divided first into categorical sections (e.g., SLEEP, GOD, WEATHER) and then into "chapters" with names like, "The Food Costumes of Montana," and "Half-Life of Walter in the American Areas," The Age Of Wire And String deadpans through the dreamlike details of another place. But unlike The Falls, in which Greenaway communicates strange and mysterious details through the mundane and familiar, The Age Of Wire And String manipulates even the language by which details are conveyed, "disclosing but not destroying the mysteries." Ordinary words seem to shed their common meanings, denoting new things just beyond reach. Even the glossaries of terms which end each section toy with comprehensibility, reeking of an internal coherence but refuting any external sense.

The book doesn't "mean" in any conventional way, but it isn't nonsense. It fosters a feeling of sense being somewhere and of a strong emotional undercurrent and depth, just out of view, just out of reach. You sense the presence of meaning even though you don't fully grasp it. 

When some people travel, they book a tour. Others immerse themselves in the strange foreignness of different places, refusing the lifejacket of the domestic and familiar. Similarly, not everyone will appreciate the disorienting strangeness of Marcus' book. For those literary explorers willing to risk getting off the bus, The Age Of Wire And String is a wonderful, strange place to visit. 

--Brad Katz