NEW YORK - Christine Brooke-Rose - an English experimental writer known for wielding words with the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator, and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others - died March 21. She was 89.

Her death was announced on the website of her British publisher, Carcanet Press. The location of Ms. Brooke-Rose’s death, whether it occurred at her longtime home in the South of France or elsewhere, was unspecified.

The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as short stories, essays, and criticism, Ms. Brooke-Rose was one of relatively few Britons to maintain a long association with experimental fiction. Her stylistic techniques - playful, polyglot, punning, postmodern, and slyly self-referential - are more typically associated with writers of the French Nouveau Roman school.

Because she often used alternative narrative devices (including unorthodox chronology and unusual typography) to create alternative realities, her work is sometimes classified as science fiction, though much of it is beyond category. As with much postmodern fiction, her writing - organized around an unspoken compact between the author, who is unspooling the text, and the reader, who is watching it unspool - is about the act of writing itself.

Her best-known novels include four whose combined titles run to just five syllables - “Out’’ (1964), “Such’’ (1965), “Between’’ (1968), “Thru’’ (1975) - followed by a syllabic splurge: “Amalgamemnon’’ (1984), “Xorandor’’ (1986), “Verbivore’’ (1990), and “Textermination.’’ In “Textermination,’’ published in 1992, literary characters from a spate of famous pens - Austen’s, Flaubert’s, Pynchon’s, Rushdie’s - convene in a San Francisco hotel to importune readers for their continued existence.