Notable American Women is a miserably bad book — or so Ben Marcus wants you to believe. In a self-scourging bit of McSweeney’s artifice entitled, "I Have Written a Bad Book," a seemingly sullen Marcus slams his paperback original, calling it "ill-conceived," "dull," and a "failure." That’s not all: he spits out a mouthful of I-never-liked-you-anyway sour grapes by alleging that every second spent crafting the novel felt excruciatingly labored, like forcing yourself to love an ugly person. "I only ever wanted to be thought of as someone who was writing a book," he mopes, "which is a fairly horrible desire to live with when one cannot actually write."

Marcus can write, and he damn well knows it — hence the anti–Neal Pollack self-posturing. But like the rest of the stunt-suckling McSweeney’s clique, he also loves to nurse a gimmick. That’s why Notable American Women is organized like a guidebook for a witching experimental cult; it’s also why such a premise extends to Marcus’s Web site, benmarcus.com, a faux corporate storefront for the stringent sect. And why the voice behind the McSweeney’s piece is just atonal enough to belong feasibly to both Ben Marcus the bald-pated Pushcart Prize winner and Ben Marcus the bald-pated and almost catatonic fictional protagonist of Notable American Women.

Structured as responses to frequently asked questions, epistolary screeds, and chronologies, Notable American Women delineates a spectral reality where women turn personal suppression into a war tactic, food visibly controls behavior, and people wear helmet-like "language diapers" to sop up their excess emotions. Central to this dystopian realm are the Silentists, the extremist-female faction that protests sound, motion, and emotion by subjecting its members to such behavior-modification rituals as controlled fainting, measured eating, motorized pantomining, and joyless copulating. Led by an ominous martinet named Jane Dark, and with the help of his mother, the Silentists have turned Ben Marcus’s home into a creepy commune; their arrival has quietly caused the death of the family pooch, the fatal name calling of Ben’s sis, the backyard burial of Ben’s father, and the dehumanization of Ben himself.

What threatens to be The World According to Garp on brown acid instead turns out to be A Clockwork Orange inverted, interpreted by an all-female Blue Man Group, and enacted in slow motion. Yet even that comparison seems flashier than the real thing: Notable American Women is a reference manual, so it tends to sacrifice narrative pacing and character development for empirical detail, leaving Marcus’s prose to fluctuate between a natural poetic elegance and a contrived instructional density. Sometimes the novel reads like a susurrus, other times it reads like a fog.

For that reason, it works best as an aggregation of sharp, poignant moments rather than as an actual story. Marcus holds a BA in philosophy, and his credentials show: the novel is a satirical nexus of meditations on feminism, extremism, copulation, subjugation, manipulation, identity, sexuality, bestiality, humanity, death, silence, movement, commerce, sustenance, language, behavior, emotion. When categorizing the different types of Silentist pantomime, Marcus writes, "The danger of mimed emotion is that there is very little difference between pretending to feel something and actually feeling it; in some cases, the pretense is even stronger, the imitation cuts deeper and lasts longer."

No surprise that the most formed character is Ben Marcus himself, an exaggerated embodiment of post-modern dysfunction, a pathetic pawn required to wear a bell around his neck (called the "Ben Marcus Locator bell") and trapped among an abducted father, an unloving mother ("As soon as Ben was conceived, he was apologized for," she avers), and a legion of powerful, frigid women. Likely a thinly veiled allegory for the male psyche, Ben finds that his sole purpose is to be a sire for the Silentists — a role that also functions as a wry attack on wish fulfillment. Sex for him is never-ending, so it becomes a chore: days without mating are "days off"; "before, during, and after intercourse" are "the only three possible descriptions of time"; and he uses words like "copulative transaction," "the send," and "withdrawal" to describe intercourse. Eventually, he even becomes a literal example of dysfunction.

"Spelling puts a corset on words," Marcus muses in "Blueprint," one of the book’s tightest and most revealing sections. "Spelling a person’s name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled." Such moments prove that Ben Marcus has certainly not written a bad book.