The Tetherballs of Bougainville

by Mark Leyner

From his cult classic,  I Smell Esther Williams, to his wildly popular and insightful column "Wild Kingdom" appearing in Esquire magazine every month, Mark Leyner has been giving us up close and personal encounters of the most hilarious kind for over a decade.

Now, in his new novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Leyner shares with us,  long last, the quintessential coming of age story that every writer, at some point, is compelled to tell.  In the novel we meet young Mark Leyner, 13-years-old to be exact, as he waits in a New Jersey prison to witness his father's execution.  Adolescence is never easy, and it just so happens that this junior high schooler is on deadline to turn in a screenplay for which he has already been awarded the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award.  And, as it was for all of us during out teenage years, nothing seems to go as planned.

Written as autobiography, screenplay and movie review, The Tetherballs of Bougainville twists three familiar narrative forms into an outlandishly compelling story.  Leyner's use of the media-driven formats brilliantly reflects our secret, shameful and hilarious desire to experience our private lives as mass entertainment.  The Tetherballs of Bougainville skewers and celebrates American pop culture in the late twentieth century.  Leyner's version of our lives is so deeply funny because it is so painfully true.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction, Comedy, American

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Mark Leyner is an American postmodernist author known for his surreal, high-energy prose, absurd humor, and densely layered narratives. A graduate of Brandeis University and the University of Colorado, Leyner studied under postmodernist Steve Katz and launched his literary career with the short story collection I Smell Esther Williams (1983). He gained a cult following with My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) and Et Tu, Babe (1992), and continued to experiment with metafiction in novels like The Tetherballs of Bougainville and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. His writing is characterized by sprawling imagery, extravagant vocabulary, and a wild mix of pop culture, medicine, and satire. Leyner’s nonfiction collaborations with Dr. Billy Goldberg, including Why Do Men Have Nipples?, became bestsellers that blended comedy and real medical facts. He has also worked as a columnist for Esquire and George, written for MTV’s Liquid Television, and co-authored the screenplay for War, Inc.. A lifelong innovator, Leyner has remained a singular voice in American fiction. His more recent books include Gone with the Mind, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, and the 2024 retrospective A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader. He lives in New Jersey and continues to influence readers and writers with his singular, genre-defying style.

Reviews

[B0nnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cover:

The preface: "I want you to feel what it's like to be ten and, while the other kids are frolicking at summer camps, you're immured in the recesses of a mildewed hovel, subsisting on cigarettes and black coffee and spending twenty hours a day shooting a perverse misanthropic video version of Pippi Longstocking using tiny intricate marionettes made of cockroach carapaces, chicken bones, rat vertebrae pried from traps, discarded condoms, foil ketchup packets - whatever you can scavenge from the garbage-strewn halls".

The plot: The 13 year old alter ego of Mark Leyner is in a prison to witness his father's execution. (Unfortunately) the father survives and now must live under the New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJSDE): he is free to go, but he might suddenly and without warning be executed by any means possible. He is given a pamphlet that explains the programme. Hey but the son has other more pressing problems than bungled executions. He must write a screenplay due the next day, for which he'll be awarded $250,000 each year for life. Instead of rushing off to the library before it closes, he has a drug and alcohol addled liaison with the female prison warden. This is the screenplay, and the second part of the book.

The judgement: The Tetherballs of Bougainville is hysterical, encyclopaedic, smart, silly, dirty - avoid it if you have a low tolerance for a three and a half hour achingly beautiful cunnilingus scene, during which paperwork is caught up on, a phone call is made negotiating the end of a hostage crisis, snacks are had.

Parts of this book (dare I say it?) are equal to anything in DFW: the preface; The NJSDE pamphlet; Len Gutman the mystical signage copywriter; the movie within review within screenplay within book; and the fact and cultural laden information overload. An annotated version would double or triple the scant 240 pages. That version is desperately needed! Take this simple sentence for example:

"...kamikaze*-guzzling Thierry Mugler**-accoutered mother (smolderingly played by Nell Carter,*** who was absolutely riveting as Madame Verdurin**** in George Romero's***** terrifying remake of Proust's Remembrance of things Past******)".

*A cocktail made of equal parts vodka, triple sec and lime juice

**French fashion designer. He first collection for women was called Café de Paris. In 1977 Mugler applied the punk street look to his collection. During the 80's, he was part of a trend that depicted women as wicked Hollywood murderers, bondage retailers of illicit sex, or Mae West clones.

***Short, heavy-set comedic African-American actress and singer with a tragic personal history. Starred on the sitcom "Gimme a Break".

****A character in Proust modeled after Madame Arman de Caillavet. Though one wonders why Leyner does not reference Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes instead.

*****Director and writer of horror films such as Night of the Living Dead

******Seriously...does this need explaining?

My criticism of Leyner is for what he didn't write: so many of these ideas could have been expanded upon. There's hardly any tetherball for one thing! Please, sir, I want some more!

The excerpt: from the movie review (which runs for 50 pages):

"Predictably, battered and suffocated bodies soon litter the floor, some pounded and literally flattened into two-dimensional scaloppini by the throng's trampling wingtips and Birkenstocks. This is far from the only instance of people being trampled to death in The Tetherballs of Bougainville. In fact, rarely do three characters congregate in this movie without one of them stumbling and dying under the feet of the other two. Whenever we're shown people emerging from a crowded elevator, we invariably discover, once that car has emptied out, the lifeless body of someone who's been inexplicably crushed to death by fellow passengers. I can understand the Ma Ling Stadium disaster scene in which drunken Bougainvillean tetherball hooligans supporting Wamp Kominika storm the stand filled with Wuwu- Bulolo Puliyasi supporters, and hundreds of people die in the ensuing stampede. But take the scene at the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—a group on a museum tour is clustered in front of Pieter Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, and when, at the behest of their guide, they continue on to the next painting, we find, remaining at the Breughel—surprise, surprise—the crumpled, broken body of some hapless art maven who somehow fell and was pummeled to death by the shoes of his companions as they scurried off to Hans Memlinc's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

The playlist: yes a playlist! with recommended artist and suggested changes (only one, actually) guaranteed by Leyner himself:

The Glow of Love - http://youtu.be/YUxEGP1xOzQ
I Know It's Over - http://youtu.be/18GrFywPkXE
Over You - http://youtu.be/M7GWvDPnuHY
Soul Crusher - http://youtu.be/-VnWmKccx_8
By You - http://youtu.be/4cr5H3eIG-8
Target - http://youtu.be/R4Jv9xOsteE
Just Like Honey - http://youtu.be/7EgB__YratE
Macarthur Park - http://youtu.be/vJiUqWn-wZw
Mozart: K156 (134b) / Adagio - http://youtu.be/rAG8IxK-JDU
Don't Go Breaking My Heart - http://youtu.be/Yee45L_O3_Y?t=32s
Schoenberg Suite Piano opus 25 http://youtu.be/pLKVe8YikRo
The Best Is Yet To Come - http://youtu.be/NqmtCrgpeik
Music of the Night - http://youtu.be/LNrkY8X8qyE
West Side Story I feel *Shitty* - http://youtu.be/QKSN9cVPQhA
Inchworm - http://youtu.be/fXi3bjKowJU
I Will Always Love You - http://youtu.be/14ivtcelIo0

[Arthur Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this rambling, tedious, overly erudite "novel" had been 4x longer than it was, I probably would've docked a star or two. Take note, ghost of DFW.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are curious about Mark Leyner's inimitable style, or have tried one of his other books and found it not to your liking, you might try reading this one. Unlike his earlier efforts, this one actually has a plot, such as it is, or at least some sort of narrative coherence, which to me made it more rewarding than his others. All of it is readable, and parts of it are extremely funny, albeit cruelly so.

I have seen books described as "a shattering odyssey of self-discovery." This book is the opposite.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Year Of Hyster(ia)(ical) Laughter (also known as The Year Of Laughing Unto Death/Death's Cackling Trumps All) began quite well with this one. More Leyner on the horizon, as the horizon draws inexorably closer.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

¿You've been reading vampire books and mommy porn but you ain't yet not read Mark Leyner's long-cold off the presses The Tetherballs of Bougainville? You, my friend have not been hip since 1997. And to make matters worse, you read Infinite Jest and disparage Jonathan Franzen for disparaging the most supreme William Gaddis but have yet still not ever yet licked the boots of Mark Leyner. E-fuckin-gads! Even Charlie Rose knows better.

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laugh out loud meta-fictional romp. Knee slapping stuff here. Forever re-reading Leyner.

[H Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be my favourite book. I first picked it up because I’d been looking for recommendations of genuinely funny contemporary novels, and found this mentioned in a list, so I tracked down a copy. I’d never heard of Mark Leyner, but the title appealed, because we used to live on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, in the second half of the 1980s, and I’d very rarely seen it referenced in a novel before. Tetherballs, the book, was published in the US in 1997. I didn’t read it until almost a decade later.

So what’s it about? Well. A preface suggests it’s some kind of ludicrous memoir:

What I really want is for you to actually inhabit my body, to get into my musculature and fascia, my limbs and trunk and head, to envelop your brain with my brain. I want you to wear my parka of viscera, to string yourself with my organs like a suicide bomber festooned with explosives. I want you to know what it feels like to walk through a Foodtown encumbered by the twitching heft of my 140 pounds and then to try to read a USDA nutrition label on a can of kipper snacks as your mind thrashes against the vortical undertow of my ghastly memories.

Except it’s not, really, at all. It’s a faux-memoir/impossible semi-pornographic screenplay/talismanic review of a non-existent film. It’s about 13-year-old Mark Leyner who is playing a video game in prison while awaiting the execution of his father Joel by lethal injection – except the execution fails and Mark’s father finds himself subject to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJDSE). This allows the state to assassinate him at any point following his release using any means they desire. As the prison superintendent describes it, 'The feature we like to stress to releasees is the indeterminacy':

“You're living your life, rowing merrily along, and suddenly one morning you wake up and there's a dwarf ninja crouched on your chest who deftly severs your carotid arteries with two honed throwing stars. Or you're on a flight to Orlando, Florida, giggling as you read the Confessions' of Saint Augustine, and meanwhile, 35,000 feet below, a New Jersey state trooper steps out of his car, kneels alongside the shoulder of I-95, aims a shoulder-held antiaircraft missile launcher, and blows your 727 into friggin' curds and whey."

“They’d do that?” I ask excitedly. “They’d sacrifice all those people just to kill my dad?”

“NJSDE gives us a lot of leeway. We’re no longer encumbered by the federal government, by the FDA, the FAA, the Justice Department… it really unties the hands of the state. I think it’s an extremely innovative piece of statutory legislation. And you have to give the Governor the bulk of the credit. She takes a lot of flak for the narcolepsy and the lathery horse posters, but she was committed to this and very savvy about the politics.”

“How do you feel about it?” my father asks, turning to the rabbi.

“It’s a very postmodern sentencing structure—random and capricious, the free-floating dread, each ensuing day as gaping abyss, the signifier hovering over the signified like the sword of Damocles. To have appropriated a pop-noir aesthetic and recontextualized it within the realm of jurisprudence is breathtakingly audacious. I think you’re going to find it a very disturbing, but a very fascinating and transformative way to live, Joel.”

If this sounds even vaguely like your sort of thing, then it probably is. I loved it immediately: the wild momentum and sheer density of ideas, the relentless comic invention, the idiotic grandiosity of the self-important teenager, the fact that there’s a passing mention of someone called Sheri Hildebrand early on…

I found this quote about the novel which sums it up nicely: ‘Not only is the basic plot utterly improbable, if not simply impossible, the text is filled with digressions, satirical attacks on mass culture, corrosively self-reflexive statements, absurd dialogue, and temporal incongruities.’ (The quote is from, magnificently, The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary by Josh Toth.)

The Tetherballs of Bougainville co-opts and ridiculously subverts all kinds of language, particularly medical terminology, and it does so in such a way that I find it almost addictive. There’s a sneaky, underlying generosity and affection for the father-son relationship amidst the high wire entertainment of the sentences, with allusions to all kinds of pop and high culture figures which work whether you’re familiar with them or not. I think.

The second part of the book is a screenplay about Mark’s drugs and booze fuelled liaison with the evening dress-wearing prison warden; the final part is a fake scathingly critical review of a non-existent film about- among other things – tetherball (like totem tennis or swingball, but with a larger ball than the tennis ball units I used as a kid) players on an imagined version of Bougainville. As you might imagine, verisimilitude is not one of the goals – as the film review itself says:

The fact that khat, a shrub cultivated exclusively in the Middle East and Africa, appears to be widely available in Bougainville, is one of several ethnobotanical incongruities in this movie. This is either a deliberate allusion to an active, multilateral global marketplace in indigenous intoxicants or simply the result of lazy fact-checking. I suspect the latter.

I suppose what draws me back to it so often is the way it combines almost everything I love in writing: an uninhibited playfulness, a devotion to subversion (including of itself and the author’s reflexive self-important pomposity) and a delight in the comic possibilities of any given medium; a refusal to accept its own limitations, and a glorying in the adrenalized joy of cascading language; an ingenious, complex and fully intentioned structure disguised as free-associative anarchy.

Leyner is a divisive writer, and I do understand why, but if you find his work is on your wavelength then there’s not much better out there. I re-read Tetherballs this week and it’s still, for me, this utterly compulsive rollercoaster of prose that makes me very, very happy indeed.

[Chris Dahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK. I talk a lot of shit. About everything.

And a lot of times I make dubious recommendations to friends. I am concerned that I have traded most of my credibility with late-night boozy tirades about how good the second Danzig record is, etc.

So hopefully someone out there will forgive me my trespasses, because this is the funniest book that I have ever read and everyone should give it a try.

I am a big Mark Leyner fan. I think that at this point that I have read all but one of his works. It makes me sad that he is not more popular, with the amount of energy wasted on other, weaker forms of satire (the pointless and unfunny lists on mcsweeneys.net spring to mind). My favorite thing about a Mark Leyner book is that you can pretty much open to any page and start there and have a completely satisfying experience, because the madness is self-contained, sentence-by-sentence.

In this new one, I was initially sad to see more of a plot than in his previous works. It starts out slow and obvious, like a slightly funnier Dave Barry. Before too long though, the loose story warps into rapid-fire comedy, spanning the worlds of pop culture, rock music, science, law, hollywood--all individual steam engines colliding on a single vertex. One giant, hilarious twist of metal.

READ THIS BOOK! FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, PLEASE READ THIS BOOK!

[Adam Sidney · Rating 5 out of 5]

any a$$hole with a master of social work can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can't mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde."

[Len · Rating 1 out of 5]

The truth is, I picked up this book for one strange reason: it has a character named Len Gutman who is a writer. How could I not read it?

Have you ever googled yourself? Come on, be honest. I do every once in a while and this book kept coming up because of the character with my name. So I finally bought it a few weeks ago.

Sad to say, I gave up about 1/3 of the way through...right after the character Len Gutman was first introduced and a few pages later when the strange story of his death came to an abrupt end.

I've read Mark Layner for years in the pages of magazines like Esquire...but just because you can write a good magazine article does not mean fiction is your thing. I just didn't get him...didn't laugh at the so-called "funny" parts and quite honestly couldn't get into the strange story.

On to the next book on my list. See, you have to be willing to put a book down if it doesn't turn you on... :)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder if I should be at all concerned for my sanity, because I was actually able to follow Leyner in this one pretty well. Regardless, I loved the book. I actually liked it better than "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack." I could just be learning how to read Leyner better, it this one seemed more organic, more free in the leaps and jumps...and no one makes leaps and jumps like Leyner. Of course, I'm not one of those people that thinks that a novelist's career is a linear process, nor do I think that my personal opinion ranking one book by an author higher than another necessarily indicates that one is better written than the other. I just grokked this one more, and I grokked it a good deal.

[Terry Clague · Rating 1 out of 5]

Things that are funnier than this "laugh-out-loud", "hilarious", "out of control" book: an iron lung, pancreatic cancer, a burning orphanage, a mindfulness seminar, a dubbed episode of "Coupling", the cartoons of the New Yorker, late-period Ronnie Barker vehicle "Clarence", visiting IKEA, the roundabouts of Coventry, and the overflow carparking facilities of Oxfordshire business parks. The author is described by the publishers as a "humourist". I mean, honestly - what was I thinking?

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may actually be the funniest book I've ever read. Ridiculously inventive and subversive.

[Constance Kwinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many's the time I've wished I could read this book again for the first time. Imagery that's still rattling around in my head... How many years ago was this published? Many years ago. Leyner is a twisted fuck. He tears apart narrative cliches like a fox in the henhouse. His writing is not for everyone. If you've read a page and don't like it, the rest of it is more of the same. He writes (I'm paraphrasing him) so that, if the pages of his book papered a room, you could throw a dart anywhere and land on an interesting sentence.

I think he delivers on that idea. The book is a fiction/screenplay/work-of-genius by its protagonist: 13-year-old Leyner, who, although 13, has all the raunchy charm of a young Ron Jeremy, tossed with an expert knowledge of medical terminology and some charming esoterica, and viniagrette.

He's a dick, but he's your friend, and you guys always somehow have fun. Probably because you don't hang out that often. But still: great book.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In short, this book is totally insane.

Technically taking place during the course of a single afternoon, The Tetherballs of Bougainville is somehow a sprawling, chaotic, and hilarious journey through the verbose psycho-ramblings of the 13-year old narrator.

The spectacular first portion of the book starts with the botched execution of the main character's father who is then released into the New Jersey Discretionary Execution Program, where he could be instantly killed by the authorities at any time and under any circumstance. It gets even weirder from there, with the second half of the book structured as a movie review nested inside of a script for a play.

Tetherballs really hard to describe, and certainly not for everyone. The writing reminds me of David Foster Wallace, where words coalesce to create impossible sentences that feel like they were written by either a genius or a mental patient.

Recommended for people with a high tolerance for weirdness.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My father is not an evil man, he just can't do PCP socially." This is the crowning achievement of American literature. The main character is the author, at junior high age, trying to write a screenplay for a contest at his school. Extremely funny and all over the place.

[Amar · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars
Weird and wonderful. Very reminiscent of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’

[Jonathan Marks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly preposterous! Hand on heart one of the funniest things I've ever read - sections towards the end had me tearing up in snickering fits. Wildly inventive plots within plots, all carried along with an absurd Pynchonesque sense of humour. Highly recommended.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been trying to track down somebody I like as much as DFW, and Leyner gets thrown in with him occasionally. Like I saw him, DFW, and Jonathan Franzen on an old Charlie Rose show. In it, Leyner says he tries to really "delight" his reader, which he expands on in Tetherballs itself, in which the main character, Mark Leyner, is reading the film review he wrote of his own movie (aptly named The Tetherballs of Bougainville) that he never made, but only reviewed (all of which is taking place in the screenplay he has written the night before being awarded the best-screenplay award from his high school -- yeah, it's one of those): "This is a movie that consistently subordinates meaning to titillation. And it is a movie that perpetually teeters between puerile perversity and puerile sentimentality. But between the perversity and the sentimentality, like a gleaming sliver of light emerging from between abutting slabs, there is---dare I say it---an element of /grace/."

Except there isn't (and simply uttering "this book has an element of grace" doesn't actually it endow it with said element). I mean there are some laugh out loud funny moments, but more often than not, I was fucking bored as shit and in parts I felt kind of embarassed for Leyner. Like when the main character and his monkey, who is really his incognito father, write a number of best-selling novels under pseudonyms like "Michael Chabon", "Donna Tartt", "Douglas Coupland", "Jennifer Belle"---and yes, you get the idea, but no, the fucking list goes on and on because Leyner has to drag every thing out until you want to puke blood---"Colin Harrison", "Tibor Fischer", "Jeffrey Eugenides", "Jonathan Franzen", "Junot Diaz", "Martin Amis", "Bret Easton Ellis", "Mona Simpson", "Peter Hoeg", "David Foster Wallace", and more. I suppose this passes for delight in the same way that reading the phone book does. There's some really funny shit in here, but a) that's not enough to make a book good and b) Leyner seems to do everything he can to drown what's good in the book under this overwhelming, self-referencing / -consuming / -defecating absurdity.

[Elliot Chalom · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I ever write a novel, this is how I want it to be. Brilliantly disjointed. Love it.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was...not as weird and cryptic as I would've thought...and rather short! The second half of THE TETHERBALLS OF BOUGAINVILLE is actually a screenplay so it goes by fast. It's a novel that deconstruct pretty much every piece of pop culture it can get its hands on and tries to build a Ionescoesque absurd comedy with the immense wreckage on a universe that's filtered through our television screens.

For the classical purists, it's about a kid witnessing his father's execution while struggling with his own ambitions of winning a prize for a movie that he hasn't written yet. It sounds excruciating said like that, but Leyner keeps is loopy, self-referential and fun the way a crazy person on pills would be. About half of the referrences were lost on me and I have to admit I've skimmed some parts which I could not decipher to save my life, but THE TETHERBALLS OF BOUGAINVILLE stirred some ideas inside my thick little skull and it's not every novel that has that merit.

[Muzzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why was I not informed of Mark Leyner?

Somehow I survived the '90s without once hearing his name. Now that I've finished "Tetherballs" in one sitting (plane ride to Boston), I know that I will buy and read every single thing he's ever published. Even the magazine bits.

This book is a miracle. I assumed that references to pop culture simply couldn't work, they eventually become dated, and then you have the Norton editors adding footnotes all over your text, so that every other word your eye plummets to the bottom of the page. "Oh, THAT Zeus. Thanks for clarifying, Norton."

Leyner proved me wrong. Even though he wrote this about two decades ago, the jokes still sting. But "Tetherballs" is so much more than a 200-page riff on TV and video games. It's a sharp satire on the death penalty in America. And I found in it a remarkably moving spoof on father-son relationships.

Free yourself from this dark and humorless existence. Start reading "Tetherballs" today. Thank me later.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leyner is a literary hero of mine. It seems like he can often accomplish in one sentence what it takes most writers to say in a few paragraphs. His writing is extremely smart, funny, and satirical--and I admit, I had to read this twice before I even began to understand it. He is very much part of the MTV, self absorbed, masculine-hyped, me generation, but somehow manages to pull it off with humor and derision. LOVE this quirky, zany novel, and wish he would write more fiction!

[Randy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Simply awful.

I heard an interview with the author on "Fresh Air" and bought the book. But it was a complete mess.

I recommend it to insomniacs.

[Kaina Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a WEIRD book but so so funny - a funky ride.

[Medicinefckdream]

probably the best part of this book is the three hour pussy eating scene,and also the big lists of things, big lists of things are insane good to me

[Sam Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

  

     Okay, so the rundown is as follows. This is a Mark Leyner book, and like the previous book I reviewed by him (The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack), it's a strange and difficult read for anyone not looking for off-the-wall absurdity. While not as difficult a read as some of his other works, it's still not particularly easy. 

       This is, however, a good absurd "memoir" about adolescent life living with a father on the run in an insane world, and I must say that it's more accessible than some and I have never read anything like it in my life. Leyner treats the absurd as commonplace, and it works wonders despite the book's inaccessibility. 

      The good bits are a vivid, vibrant world full of grotesque and blackly comic touches that make up a sort of "commonplace absurdity" allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the insanity, even to luxuriate in it.

      The bad bits are that the book is a holy terror to read, and the simple fact that it is very hard to access and get into for anyone not used to Leyner and his particular brand of weird. However, should you be able to get beyond this particular setback, the book is worth a read.

More, as always, below.

[[MORE]]



   "Instant spatzle" - Mark

      I've tried and failed to explain how Mark Leyner gets me before, so allow me to say this. The man is a genius. I don't know how he does what he does, and I don't know why, but his habit of blowing everyday life into ridiculous, absurd, cartoonish proportions and then setting it gently in front of people with nary a word and letting them figure out what the big deal is. When he worried his fame was going to his head, he wrote a black comedy on par with Naked Lunch where his steroid-crazed alter ego (also named Mark Leyner) proceeded to live out psychotic and sometimes violent delusions of grandeur that became more twisted and disjointed as the book went on. And when he decided to write a sort of pseudo-memoir about his teenage years, the result was The Tetherballs of Bougainville. 



       I found this book like I found many others...I worked my way through My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, then thought a novel of his might be more coherent and stumbled into Et Tu, Babe with nary a thought. And then, because I thought he might have more of a hand on the tiller for a book that he claimed was more or less a recollection of his life (albeit fictional), I made an attempt at The Tetherballs of Bougainville. I figured my inexperience and failure with that first attempt was due to some kind of immaturity on my part, and so I tried it again just this summer, hoping to finally barrel through with an older, wiser approach.



       And the book blindsided me just as much as it did back then. 



      The Tetherballs of Bougainville is about Mark Leyner, a young man going to Maplewood Junior High School in New Jersey while balancing success as a screenwriter. The book opens with Mark playing Gianni Isotope on his Game Boy as his father is about to be executed via lethal injection. Mark's phone rings, and he is alerted to the fact that he still hasn't finished his screenplay for a recent competition. The rabbi, executioner, and various assembled members of the execution party all offer him notes on his screenplay, and his father gives his last words. His last words are a rambling story about hairstyling a woman with an exposed cranium and giving her a cut that she'll only have to comb, and even then not that much. Oh, yeah, and I forgot to mention, the Governor of New Jersey is a teenage cliche who makes the lawyers and judges in the state big-hair wigs, and the elder Mr. Leyner's rampage might have been caused by a combination of Angel Dust and a minute burst of gamma radiation coming from the moon.



      And then things get w-- okay, so they're already at Maximum Weird. This is a Mark Leyner book we're talking about after all. 



       Mark's father fails to die and suffers no neurological damage, so the state puts him into a special execution program that means at some point, without his father's knowledge and directed by a computer program that synthesizes random numbers from DNA fragments, New Jersey State Troopers will bring him down by any means necessary. Be it blowing up a building, shooting down a plane, or personally shooting him with a sniper rifle, Joel Leyner will be brought to justice and the New Jersey State Troopers (who now have universal jurisdiction) will be the instrument of his destruction. While his father is instructed of his fate and processed for release from the prison, Mark lapses back and forth between his screenplay and reality, having conversations and fantasy sequences that bleed into another. He seduces the female prison warden by talking dirty, starting out with the words "instant spatzle". He has a conversation with his father at an amusement park while his father is dressed as an orangutan. Conversations are soundtracked by the sound of people...chafing...against one another. And the paths lead deeper and deeper into Mark's twisted conscious and subconscious, resulting in an abrupt and absurd finish that may or may not be real within the confines of the book.



            I suppose one of the things I like so much about the book is the audacity of it. While more and more people are heading out to those fenced-off limits Mark Leyner leapt over and ran screaming past, Leyner is one of the first, and he is certainly one of the most cohesive. He manages to tackle the absurd with a certain charm and grace, and while his story is full of mall-hair wigs, random explosions, close brushes with death, and dirty talk about microwaveable entrees, he manages to make it all hold together. Each page reveals some new absurdity, some fresh hell Leyner wishes to throw everyone into, and it never feels forced or like he's trying too hard. It feels a little self-conscious at times, but that's to be expected. It is, after all, a memoir of sorts, and you can't do a memoir without being at least somewhat self-conscious, as a memoir is a combination of the truth and a memory of the truth, ultimately resulting in something in between. Leyner manages to embroider his fictional memoir with ridiculous details, but it all feels quite natural.



              I also like the amount of description that goes on. Tetherballs isn't a book that luxuriates in its grotesquerie the same way Sloughing Off The Rot might on occasion, but it doesn't shy away from it completely, either. In particular, one of the details I missed on my first pass through the book was the soundtrack I mentioned earlier, something too nasty to describe in detail here, but quite evocative as Mark and the doctor responsible for the lethal cocktail of drugs have a conversation about what goes into a lethal injection shot. The juxtaposition is only helped by the description. Similarly, Mr. Leyner spends a lot of time on describing the various bizarre concepts he puts forth, be they the skin folds in the Warden's arm, or any number of insane attempts by the State Troopers to put down Joel Leyner. And somehow, he manages to make it all casual. 



             The casual tone of the book also helps draw the reader in. What many authors need to realize is that treating the unusual as unusual within the world merely creates a sense of disconnect and artifice. What one needs to do is treat the unusual as part of their world, as part of the things they create. That way, when something truly unusual comes along, it stands out. It sticks up like a sore thumb, and there's no need to call attention to it. Pretending everything is normal is an essential part of the narrative and a way to immerse the reader directly into the world. Tetherballs manages to do this by gradually changing the rules of reality as it flickers back and forth between screenplay and reality, each new grotesquerie seen as somewhat normal compared to the horrors existing further down the line in the book. 



              However, the book is far from accessible. It takes a special kind of person to want to read after the opening sequence and the long discussion of the title Even Mighty Mouse is Vivisected by the Bitch in the White Labcoat*. It takes an even hardier person to get through the long hallucinatory passages as the story twists in and out of Mark's brain and indeed the various metafictional nodes in the book. For this reason, much like The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack, I can't recommend this book. I can recommend trying it as much as you like, but I cannot actually out-and-out recommend the book. 



                But in the end, I like it a lot. It's funny, twisted, and if nothing else, startlingly original. You will never read anything else like it, or maybe you have, but it either went higher or lower than this one did. This is absurdism done right, and Leyner is right up there with Steve Aylett in my book. Take this out of the library if you're looking for a strange read, but I can't recommend it outside that. 





NEXT WEEK:



Night Film by Marisha Pessl



AND THEN:

The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Thunderer by Felix Gilman



AND MANY MORE



*approx. 
*approx. 

[David Chess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh

At first I thought, ha, classic Leyner, this is great! (I loved I Smell Esther Williams, and especially My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.) Then after a bit I thought, well, it's maybe too much classic Leyner, and he's sort of just doing the same things again. And then I thought, eh, this is classic Leyner but without the parts that made it good.

And then it kept going for far too long.

Sure, it's extremely meta, and sure it is full of fanservice to the snickering 7th grader in all of us, and of cultural references that can be interpreted as ironically or otherwise as one feels moved at the time. But that's not enough. It doesn't have the humor that I associate with Leyner, or the wit. Just the sort of empty "of course I don't mean all of this" of a postmodernism that's forgotten why it bothered in the first place.

And have we all somehow agreed to overlook the fact that pretty much the entire book is nominally a sex scene between a 13 year old boy and a thirty-something woman? I mean, sure, it's neither a titillating nor a realistic sex scene, and the 13 year old boy is not at all a realistic 13 year old boy, but still. I had the impression that publishers still had a problem with this kind of thing.

Sadly not impressed.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing about early Leyner books is that you can never relax for a second; Joyce and Faulkner are the only two authors I can think of whose books are more intrinsically challenging than this, Leyner's second full-length narrative. Even calling it a narrative understates the complexity of the second half, ostensibly a written review of a non-existent movie that the character, Mark Leyner, must write by some time the next day.

Leyner is just so insanely smart and intellectually funny; he not only posits a island despot building the Petronas towers as, instead, naked lovers, but then creates the New York Times reaction to it and discusses which sections would be featured in German style magazines, all in one throw-away paragraph.

When combined with double-backs, curlicues, and recursive prose, it creates the effect of looking into an actual madhouse of creativity. If it's this intense to read, how crazy must it have been to write?

What Leyner hadn't quite gotten a hold of, in these earlier novels, is the need for emotional resonance to make things both more engrossing and less exhausting. Page for page, I can't imagine you'd ever find a more dense hyper-meta-fictional achievement. Also, I'm not sure you'd want to.

[Owen Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I described this book to someone who hadn’t read it, I could easily imagine them using the words “stupid” or “pointless” or maybe “why the hell would you want to read that?”. The answer to that last one, by the way, is that it was for class thank you very much. But despite the insane rambling, ADHD-brained, layered structure employed by Leyner, or maybe because of it, this book is certainly enjoyable. There is definitely some kind of depth here, but it seems almost purposefully buried under intentionally absurd nonsense—which is okay because it’s all funny and interesting. I don’t know quite what to think about this novel, I just know that I think I like it. That all being said, I am sure I will find it incredibly difficult to write an essay on. Recommend if you have traumatic brain injury from a skateboarding accident.