Marcus’ novel tracks the bizarre interactions and wanderings of characters named after the author and his parents, who he insists are nothing like their fictional namesakes. “Left to his own devices,” she explains in the book, “Ben would have no devices.” Still not convinced? Then listen to his mother, Jane Marcus. “If you are in a position to look at this Ben Marcus,” Michael Marcus warns readers of his son’s second novel, “Notable American Women” (Vintage Contemporaries, $12.50), “it will help to scan smartly away from his form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape - the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps and flowers - in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben’s body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object.” Ben Marcus is an awful young man - unsightly and impolite and, at best, marginally talented.
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