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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Lib/E
High above the bustling streets of Dubai, in the world's tallest and most luxurious skyscraper, reside the Gods and Goddesses of the modern world. Since they emerged fourteen billion years ago from a bus blaring a tune remarkably similar to the Mister Softee jingle, they've wreaked mischief and havoc on mankind. Unable to control their jealousies, the Gods have splintered into several factions, led by the immortal enemies XOXO, Shanice, La Felina, Fast-Cooking Ali, and Mogul Magoo. Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher from New Jersey, is their current obsession. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is Ike's epic story. A raucous tale of Gods and men confronting lust, ambition, death, and the eternal verities, it is a wildly fun, wickedly fast gambol through the unmapped corridors of the imagination.
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First published January 1, 2012
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About the author
Mark Leyner
28 books337 followersMark 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.
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December 20, 2024
"The phrase 'sugar frosted nutsack' occurs 3,385 times in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (including this sentence)."
Ya know, I didn't fact-check that or anything, but I really don't doubt it.
This book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, is really not The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that it claims to be on its surface. Or, to put it another way, the book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, is not really the same thing as the sprawling, self-perpetuating, constantly layering, peeling, and reiterating epic, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, which we could safely take to be its subject. And yet, on some level at least, somehow they wind up being the same goddamn thing after all.
In one of the many frequent critical asides Leyner is notorious for resorting to in his work, much to the delight of his devotees and the dismay of his detractors, at one point he explains:
"The Sugar Frosted Nutsack was never actually 'written'. A recursive aggregate of excerpts, interpolations, and commentaries, it's been 'produced' through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy. Composition has tended to more closely resemble the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional 'writing'."
In this passage, it is perhaps impossible to tell whether he's referring to The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, the book, or The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, the epic at its center, but in the end it really doesn't matter because both the book and the epic it's about seem to operate on this same basic set of mechanics. With "all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying cliches, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies and masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetition compulsion," both The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack offer an unending succession of variant, if still canonical, renditions of the whole effervescent enchilada as it's being experienced.
There's actually more discussion of the epic here than there is of the epic itself, a curious narrative device wherein much of the book's "plot" is really nothing more than constant reconsideration of things that have already happened, things that have not yet happened, and things that will never happen within the book or the epic it relates. In both, one is left with the distinct impression that anything can happen at any future point because very little actually happens outside of the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards performing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack or the author's commentary on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in his book of the same title. "To a critical degree," Leyner writes, "this infinite recursion of bracketed redundancies is what gives The Sugar Frosted Nutsack its peculiarly numinous and incantatory quality. Everything about it becomes it."
True to form, Leyner closes the book long after things have gotten quite ridiculous, but somewhat before they've grown quite annoying. I'm sure many readers will disagree with me on this, but one of the reasons why I prefer Leyner over DFW (besides the fact that he's just plain funnier) is that he knows when to have mercy on you. Humans weren't designed to be able to tolerate much more than approximately 250-300 pages of this type of shit, but apparently the editor of Infinite Jest never got that particular memo.
Having finally finished this book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and my review of it, I feel kinda like one of those husbands whose wives invariably leave him for one of the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards following each performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And so...
Instead of humiliating myself
By begging you to come back,
I'll devote the rest of my life
To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack!
Ya know, I didn't fact-check that or anything, but I really don't doubt it.
This book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, is really not The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that it claims to be on its surface. Or, to put it another way, the book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, is not really the same thing as the sprawling, self-perpetuating, constantly layering, peeling, and reiterating epic, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, which we could safely take to be its subject. And yet, on some level at least, somehow they wind up being the same goddamn thing after all.
In one of the many frequent critical asides Leyner is notorious for resorting to in his work, much to the delight of his devotees and the dismay of his detractors, at one point he explains:
"The Sugar Frosted Nutsack was never actually 'written'. A recursive aggregate of excerpts, interpolations, and commentaries, it's been 'produced' through layering and augmentation, repetition and redundancy. Composition has tended to more closely resemble the loop-based step sequencing we associate with Detroit techno music than with traditional 'writing'."
In this passage, it is perhaps impossible to tell whether he's referring to The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, the book, or The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, the epic at its center, but in the end it really doesn't matter because both the book and the epic it's about seem to operate on this same basic set of mechanics. With "all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying cliches, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies and masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetition compulsion," both The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack offer an unending succession of variant, if still canonical, renditions of the whole effervescent enchilada as it's being experienced.
There's actually more discussion of the epic here than there is of the epic itself, a curious narrative device wherein much of the book's "plot" is really nothing more than constant reconsideration of things that have already happened, things that have not yet happened, and things that will never happen within the book or the epic it relates. In both, one is left with the distinct impression that anything can happen at any future point because very little actually happens outside of the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards performing The Sugar Frosted Nutsack or the author's commentary on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in his book of the same title. "To a critical degree," Leyner writes, "this infinite recursion of bracketed redundancies is what gives The Sugar Frosted Nutsack its peculiarly numinous and incantatory quality. Everything about it becomes it."
True to form, Leyner closes the book long after things have gotten quite ridiculous, but somewhat before they've grown quite annoying. I'm sure many readers will disagree with me on this, but one of the reasons why I prefer Leyner over DFW (besides the fact that he's just plain funnier) is that he knows when to have mercy on you. Humans weren't designed to be able to tolerate much more than approximately 250-300 pages of this type of shit, but apparently the editor of Infinite Jest never got that particular memo.
Having finally finished this book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, and my review of it, I feel kinda like one of those husbands whose wives invariably leave him for one of the blind, drug-addled, vagrant bards following each performance of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. And so...
Instead of humiliating myself
By begging you to come back,
I'll devote the rest of my life
To chanting The Sugar Frosted Nutsack!
November 30, 2012
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is not easily explained. It's best just to dive in and have a look. Here is the opening paragraph,
What a scatter-shot of images. I'm haunted by those robots roasting freshly gutted fish at a river's edge. Surely they are the cute, slightly awkward and angsty Asimov robots, and not the evil terminator type.
Some of these images I wish I could unsee.
Well, the Gods arrive and then things really begin to have no sense. Nonsense it is. Hilarious nonsense. Is Leyner just showing off, the droll know it all, or is there a deeper message here? Like, don't sweat the small stuff we are nothing, have nothing but small stuff is that all there is then let's keep dancing?
DFW analyses Leyner's work in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". He sees it as a literary response to the writer being trapped in this age of television. By celebrating it, by taking a reverently ironic stance, we can transcend feelings of mass-defined angst,
He's referring to a different book, but it applies to Nutsack as well I think.
There isn't really much of a plot, just enough to glue together one hysterical scene after another. Some of my favourites:
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack performances - it is an epic story in the tradition of Homer. Each "section" is called a "Season" and performed "by nameless, typically blind men, high on ecstasy or ketamine, seated in a circle, and chanting for hours and hours on end as they sipped orange soda from a jerrycan ... every new improvisational flourish, every exegetical commentary and meta-commentary, every cough, sniffle, and hiccough on the part of the bard is incorporated into the story, and is then required in each subsequent performance".
Ike Karton - "He's an unassuming, plain-spoken (albeit delusional and anti-Semitic) man. He speaks with the air of a hero accustomed to—even weary of—fame (even though he's completely unknown outside the small Jersey City neighborhood of attached and identical two-story brick homes where he's considered an unstable and occasionally menacing presence—although it must be added that women overwhelmingly find him extremely charming and sexy, and many suspect that Ike playacts his indefensible anti-Semitism only to make himself a more loathsome pariah on his block, i.e., to make himself even more charming and sexy)."
Ike's List - "10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women" - plagiarized "from beginning to end, word for word, from something that had appeared in the November 2008 issue of 0, The Oprah Magazine." This is a real article written by Leyner for that same magazine. http://www.oprah.com/spirit/What-I-Kn...
T.G.I.F. (Ten Gods I'd Fuck) - do not forget to include the Goddess Shanice or you'll deeply regret it - although it's best not to make such a list.
Mummy Porn - if you're tired of mommy porn, try mummy porn. A young woman named Mi-Hyun has the god Bosco Hijikepunye, the God of Miscellany (including Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, Steam Vac Carpet Cleaners, etc., etc.) for a lover. Their romantic encounters are "different",
John Cage's 4'33" - as a ringtone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKF...
Military-grade ass-cheese - potentially neurotoxic, but "I've always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it's basically the shit that just fucks everything up."
Penis van Lesbian - a story illustrating the mystical significance of names.
There was never nothing. But before the debut of the Gods, about 14 billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent. Isolated, disjointed events would take place, only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one from the next. A terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing a lot of high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra's fairies, except for their wasted pallors, acne, big tits, and t-shirts that read "I Don't Do White Guys") would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear. And then millions and millions of years would pass, until, seemingly out of nowhere, there'd be, fleetingly... the smell of fresh rolls. Then several more billion years of inert monotony... and then... a houndstooth pattern EVERYWHERE for approximately 10-37 seconds...followed by, again, the fade to immutable blackness and another eternal interstice... and then, suddenly, what might be cicadas or the chafing sound of some obese jogger's nylon track pants...and then the sepia-tinged photograph from a 1933 Encyclopædia Britannica of a man with elephantiasis of the testicles... robots roasting freshly gutted fish at a river's edge... the strobelike fulgurations of ultraviolet emission nebulae... the unmistakable sound of a koto being plucked... and then a toilet flushing. And this last enigmatic event—the flushing of a toilet—was followed by the most inconceivably long hiatus of them all, a sepulchral interregnum of several trillion years. And, as time went on, it began to seem less and less likely that another event would ever occur. Finally, nothing was taking place but the place. There was a definite room tone—that hum, that hymn to pure ontology—but that was all. And in this interminable void, in this black hyperborean stillness, deep in the farthest-flung recesses of empty space, at that vanishing point in the infinite distance where parallel lines ultimately converge... two headlights appeared. And there was the sound, barely audible, of something akin to the Mister Softee jingle. Now, of course, it wasn't the Mister Softee truck whose headlights, like stars light-years in the distance, were barely visible. And it wasn't the Mister Softee jingle per se. It was the beginning of something—a few recursive, foretokening measures of music that were curiously familiar, though unidentifiable, and addictively catchy—something akin to the beginning of "Surry with the Fringe on Top" or "Under My Thumb" or "Tears of a Clown" or "White Wedding." And it repeated ad infinitum as those tiny twinkling headlights became imperceptibly larger and drew incrementally closer over the course of the million trillion years that it took for the Gods to finally arrive.
What a scatter-shot of images. I'm haunted by those robots roasting freshly gutted fish at a river's edge. Surely they are the cute, slightly awkward and angsty Asimov robots, and not the evil terminator type.
Some of these images I wish I could unsee.
Well, the Gods arrive and then things really begin to have no sense. Nonsense it is. Hilarious nonsense. Is Leyner just showing off, the droll know it all, or is there a deeper message here? Like, don't sweat the small stuff we are nothing, have nothing but small stuff is that all there is then let's keep dancing?
DFW analyses Leyner's work in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction". He sees it as a literary response to the writer being trapped in this age of television. By celebrating it, by taking a reverently ironic stance, we can transcend feelings of mass-defined angst,
It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repellent.
He's referring to a different book, but it applies to Nutsack as well I think.
There isn't really much of a plot, just enough to glue together one hysterical scene after another. Some of my favourites:
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack performances - it is an epic story in the tradition of Homer. Each "section" is called a "Season" and performed "by nameless, typically blind men, high on ecstasy or ketamine, seated in a circle, and chanting for hours and hours on end as they sipped orange soda from a jerrycan ... every new improvisational flourish, every exegetical commentary and meta-commentary, every cough, sniffle, and hiccough on the part of the bard is incorporated into the story, and is then required in each subsequent performance".
Ike Karton - "He's an unassuming, plain-spoken (albeit delusional and anti-Semitic) man. He speaks with the air of a hero accustomed to—even weary of—fame (even though he's completely unknown outside the small Jersey City neighborhood of attached and identical two-story brick homes where he's considered an unstable and occasionally menacing presence—although it must be added that women overwhelmingly find him extremely charming and sexy, and many suspect that Ike playacts his indefensible anti-Semitism only to make himself a more loathsome pariah on his block, i.e., to make himself even more charming and sexy)."
Ike's List - "10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women" - plagiarized "from beginning to end, word for word, from something that had appeared in the November 2008 issue of 0, The Oprah Magazine." This is a real article written by Leyner for that same magazine. http://www.oprah.com/spirit/What-I-Kn...
T.G.I.F. (Ten Gods I'd Fuck) - do not forget to include the Goddess Shanice or you'll deeply regret it - although it's best not to make such a list.
Mummy Porn - if you're tired of mommy porn, try mummy porn. A young woman named Mi-Hyun has the god Bosco Hijikepunye, the God of Miscellany (including Fibromyalgia, Chicken Tenders, Sports Memorabilia, Steam Vac Carpet Cleaners, etc., etc.) for a lover. Their romantic encounters are "different",
John Cage's 4'33" - as a ringtone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKF...
Military-grade ass-cheese - potentially neurotoxic, but "I've always thought that military-grade ass-cheese is just basically the shit that gums up the works in your life. Do you know what I mean? This is just my interpretation, but I think it's basically the shit that just fucks everything up."
Penis van Lesbian - a story illustrating the mystical significance of names.
November 20, 2018
'Tis a book of opposites. Intellectual and low-brow. Erudite and juvenile. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is in-your-face postmodernism and self-referential to the max. Reminded me, in some ways, of a book by Goodreads author and infamous Scottish whippersnapper MJ Nichols. If you are new to Leyner and his comedy of the absurd, I recommend you start with My Cousin My Gastroenterologist instead. I still find MCMG to be his best and most startling work. I have enjoyed all his fiction to one degree or another, but I've never felt he attained quite the anarchic glee of that first short story collection. And in the case of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, he has taken his absurdity quite seriously...and the result is something less humorous and less surprising...if smarter (in some ways).
The premise, roughly (and it can only be captured roughly as the premise of the book itself is constantly under attack by the book), is: one blue-collar anti-Semite (self-satirically?) unemployed anarcho-primitivist (in name only?) Ike Karton (Kike Cartoon?) is a pawn of—and masturbatory object of—a ridiculous crew of all-powerful yet entirely petty Gods and Goddesses. Got that? I thought so. To continue: Ike Karton has visions of his own impending death (suicide by cop? fall guy for the Gods?), and he slowly moves toward it through the book while the book itself represents his story as an oral Bible. An oral retelling of his life becomes the Bible of civilization and TSFN continually recaptures and recaptures the telling of the retelling of the retelling his life in fits and starts. Bible, as in, apparently, in this world there is only one religion left standing, the worship of Ike Karton and his family, and this book Cliff Notes his story. Unfortunately, for us and for Ike, the Gods are (maybe) vying for (or in cahoots, taking turns for)...power? entertainment? the best pranks on humanity?)...and as a result, everything is just pretty much...fucked up.
And like any good postmodern romp, the story eats itself over and over again. Referring to itself, accusing itself of rewriting itself. The author showing his cards, pulls the rug out from under you, and tricks you. Giving you a sense of meaning, then stealing it.
Makes sense? Piece of cake.
I'm going to relate two quotes from the book.
This first quote is the author stating what the "innermost secret" of the "epic" is. And I believe he is blatantly stating it even though it is couched in the ridiculous.
[Note, when I reference T.S.F.N, this is exactly how Leyner writes it, and he also includes the boldface and italics...something he does throughout the entire book in a way that is clearly annoying, but I suspect intentionally annoying.]
This second quote is essentially Leyner providing a critical description of the tone of the story and it neatly sums up the premise as well. As he writes, "Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order."
Indeed. Indeed.
The premise, roughly (and it can only be captured roughly as the premise of the book itself is constantly under attack by the book), is: one blue-collar anti-Semite (self-satirically?) unemployed anarcho-primitivist (in name only?) Ike Karton (Kike Cartoon?) is a pawn of—and masturbatory object of—a ridiculous crew of all-powerful yet entirely petty Gods and Goddesses. Got that? I thought so. To continue: Ike Karton has visions of his own impending death (suicide by cop? fall guy for the Gods?), and he slowly moves toward it through the book while the book itself represents his story as an oral Bible. An oral retelling of his life becomes the Bible of civilization and TSFN continually recaptures and recaptures the telling of the retelling of the retelling his life in fits and starts. Bible, as in, apparently, in this world there is only one religion left standing, the worship of Ike Karton and his family, and this book Cliff Notes his story. Unfortunately, for us and for Ike, the Gods are (maybe) vying for (or in cahoots, taking turns for)...power? entertainment? the best pranks on humanity?)...and as a result, everything is just pretty much...fucked up.
And like any good postmodern romp, the story eats itself over and over again. Referring to itself, accusing itself of rewriting itself. The author showing his cards, pulls the rug out from under you, and tricks you. Giving you a sense of meaning, then stealing it.
Makes sense? Piece of cake.
I'm going to relate two quotes from the book.
This first quote is the author stating what the "innermost secret" of the "epic" is. And I believe he is blatantly stating it even though it is couched in the ridiculous.
[Note, when I reference T.S.F.N, this is exactly how Leyner writes it, and he also includes the boldface and italics...something he does throughout the entire book in a way that is clearly annoying, but I suspect intentionally annoying.]
This is the innermost secret of the epic. Before the arrival of the Gods, everything was wildly italicized. This was the time of the so-called “Spring Break." There were only phenomena and vaguely defined personages, and there was really no discernible distinction between phenomena and personages. There were no "Gods” per se, no dramatis personae, there was only an undifferentiated, unidimensional T.S.F.N.—only the infinitely recursive story and its infinitely droning loops, varying infinitesimally with each iteration. But once the Gods arrived and got off the bus, they insisted on being boldfaced signifiers. The whole epic is about the war on the part of T.S.F.N. to vanquish the boldfaced signifiers and reestablish the "golden age" when things happened without any discernible context; when there were no recognizable patterns; when it was all incoherent; when isolated, disjointed events would take place only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic silence that estranged one form from the next...Replace "eons of entropic silence" with "the way this book is written" and you've pretty much got it. Leyner is vanquishing sense and sensibility in an orgy of self-contradiction. Leading you to think there is meaning and then snatching it away in an impossible attempt to recreate meaninglessness meaning. So, there you have it.
This second quote is essentially Leyner providing a critical description of the tone of the story and it neatly sums up the premise as well. As he writes, "Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order."
Indeed. Indeed.
March 20, 2012
I won this book in a goodreads giveaway.
This book was making me literally lose my mind. My roommate had to talk me down from a mental breakdown while reading this....this...novel? It was so infuriatingly repetitive (which was intentional as the book actually used the phrase "excruciating redundancies" close to 100 times-if not more than).
For the first half, I was convinced that this was a capital 'I' Important book, but I had no idea why.
It was stressful and mind-numbing at the same time. I was slowly but surely dissuaded from this line of thought as I fought to complete the book (yes...fought). In the end, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack turned out to be quite the stress reliever...in the sense that I felt much better after I chucked it across the room--twice.
I finished this book, unlike more than a few of the other reviewers, which means it can no longer haunt me. I can't knowingly recommend this book to ANYONE in the fear that it might turn into some Jumanji type ordeal where the reader will be sucked in never to be heard from again aside from the occasional ravings of a mind gone mad. I barely escaped alive.
SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
If you won this book in a giveaway, lock it into a safebox in the back of your closet. Do not try to just throw it away. If some lowly passerby were to pick it up and begin reading it, you will never forgive yourself. If you bought this book....well, God help you.
This book was making me literally lose my mind. My roommate had to talk me down from a mental breakdown while reading this....this...novel? It was so infuriatingly repetitive (which was intentional as the book actually used the phrase "excruciating redundancies" close to 100 times-if not more than).
For the first half, I was convinced that this was a capital 'I' Important book, but I had no idea why.
It was stressful and mind-numbing at the same time. I was slowly but surely dissuaded from this line of thought as I fought to complete the book (yes...fought). In the end, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack turned out to be quite the stress reliever...in the sense that I felt much better after I chucked it across the room--twice.
I finished this book, unlike more than a few of the other reviewers, which means it can no longer haunt me. I can't knowingly recommend this book to ANYONE in the fear that it might turn into some Jumanji type ordeal where the reader will be sucked in never to be heard from again aside from the occasional ravings of a mind gone mad. I barely escaped alive.
SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
If you won this book in a giveaway, lock it into a safebox in the back of your closet. Do not try to just throw it away. If some lowly passerby were to pick it up and begin reading it, you will never forgive yourself. If you bought this book....well, God help you.
April 2, 2012
3.5 stars rounded up for the sake of audacity and originality -- and the excitement/expectation/military-grade Gravy-like ecstasy I felt with my hands on a new Mark Leyner novel after a 15-year absence. I didn't mind that it's a looping, recursive epic, with excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes and wearying cliches, overwrought angst, gnomic non sequiturs, off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetition compulsion . . . That last bit there I plagiarized from the novel -- it's compulsively repeated throughout, like a built-in critique for lazy haters to use. I laughed out loud or made strange happy vocal noises maybe 40+ times? Bothered wifey several times with requests to let me read aloud to her. There's a ZINGER of a John Cage joke. There's a tearing-up-laughing joke about Dick Van Dyke. And otherwise there's typical Leyner brand pyrotechnic high-lit pop-lit satirical silliness, featuring clinical language mixed with Romantic language mixed with postmodern theory language mixed with Jerry Springer language mixed with tabloid language mixed with online commentary language, all of it undermined by a god named XOXO. This sort of thing is not for everyone. Not at all for everyone (all the exasperated one- and two-star reviews by people who won this book through goodreads are awesome!). If you like Charlie Kaufman movies ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" or "Being John Malkovich"), more recent George Saunders (Leyner has the same agent, Binky Urban), the wackier DFW stuff (Leyner has the same editor, Michael Pietsch), you'll bask in this intentionally over-the-top hi-falutin mock-Homeric craziness. If you don't like the aforementioned stuff, if you're a picky humorless reader who cares about character development and plot and emotionality, that is, anything more than riffs about gods doing human characters with the frozen head of Ted Williams used as an anal bead once the human character is increased in size by the god to 50 feet, etc, I wouldn't bother with this one. But otherwise, if you're interested in an example of truly LOL writing that's unhinged and intelligent and puerile and SO FREAKING POMO and, importantly, serves as a great example of a book that teaches you how to read it, Leyner is at the very least a demi-god. Otherwise, this was maybe too long for me by 100 quick pages. An absolute must for fans of seriously funny effed-up writing. Familiarity with medical terminology a plus!
Here's a Mark Leyner profile in the New York Times if you need a refresher on who he is and where he's been: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/mag...
Here's a review by Ben Marcus in the New York Times Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/boo...
Here's a Mark Leyner profile in the New York Times if you need a refresher on who he is and where he's been: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/mag...
Here's a review by Ben Marcus in the New York Times Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/boo...
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May 20, 2017Welcome back, Babe!
Five stars for our 21st century Homer. Blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards, indeed.
But I have a few complaints about this book:
a) The paper is too cheap. More of a mass market paperback paper than a nice cloth bound paper. Oh, and they trimmed the deckle edge. I hate that!
{NYT interview by Adam Sternbergh here which includes that classic Charlie Rose Show (which reminds me of the opening sequence of that documentary about Anvil) and a link to the Kakutani review of that contemporary masterpiece, Et Tu, Babe.}
b) There is no About the Typeface section.
c) Not a complaint, but there were just enough typos to keep me interested and engaged in uncovering them.
{Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike!}
d) Some of the letters on the cover were printed backwards, but not enough of them -- z.B., Charles Yu's blurb could have been cleverly printed backwards, or maybe just the second line. Plus, the book contained no type which required a mirror to decipher.
e) We never find out how "Mark Leyner" came to create a written version of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva). After all, Writing makes all the Difference.
f) Too compulsively Freudian in its compulsive repetition.
g) 'balaclava' and 'baklava' occur too frequently without any discernible context.
h) Mr. Leyner did not provide me with an inscribed copy.
i) Mr. Leyner has apparently not learned from the most honorable Dave Eggers that one really outta take advantage of the copyright page and put in some good doodles. Oh, and drawings -- the book could have used some drawings.
j) {Spoiler allert} Indeed, "One size [may] fits all" but what I really want to know is:
Over all I'll have to say Mr. Leyner made an epic go at it. One hopes that the Leyner bus won't dawdle so damn long at spring break 'til he drops a bit more of his godly guano. God, he is SO FUCKIN' high right now!
Recommendations
Five stars for our 21st century Homer. Blind, vagrant, drug-addled bards, indeed.
But I have a few complaints about this book:
a) The paper is too cheap. More of a mass market paperback paper than a nice cloth bound paper. Oh, and they trimmed the deckle edge. I hate that!
{NYT interview by Adam Sternbergh here which includes that classic Charlie Rose Show (which reminds me of the opening sequence of that documentary about Anvil) and a link to the Kakutani review of that contemporary masterpiece, Et Tu, Babe.}
b) There is no About the Typeface section.
c) Not a complaint, but there were just enough typos to keep me interested and engaged in uncovering them.
{Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike! Ike!}
d) Some of the letters on the cover were printed backwards, but not enough of them -- z.B., Charles Yu's blurb could have been cleverly printed backwards, or maybe just the second line. Plus, the book contained no type which required a mirror to decipher.
e) We never find out how "Mark Leyner" came to create a written version of the The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva). After all, Writing makes all the Difference.
f) Too compulsively Freudian in its compulsive repetition.
g) 'balaclava' and 'baklava' occur too frequently without any discernible context.
h) Mr. Leyner did not provide me with an inscribed copy.
i) Mr. Leyner has apparently not learned from the most honorable Dave Eggers that one really outta take advantage of the copyright page and put in some good doodles. Oh, and drawings -- the book could have used some drawings.
j) {Spoiler allert} Indeed, "One size [may] fits all" but what I really want to know is:
Is there any-thaaaang good inside of you
If there is, I really wanna know-woh-oh-oh-oh --
Is there any-thaaaang good inside of you
If there is, I really wanna know, really wanna know . . .
Over all I'll have to say Mr. Leyner made an epic go at it. One hopes that the Leyner bus won't dawdle so damn long at spring break 'til he drops a bit more of his godly guano. God, he is SO FUCKIN' high right now!
Recommendations
April 26, 2022
When the spotty and poorly sexed Scotch yokel M.J. Nicholls self-published his first novel A Postmodern Belch in the same year as Mark Leyner published A Sugar Frosted (sic) Nutsack (sic) with an internationally impressive publisher, no one could have foreseen the calamitous literary collision that would ensue. A Postmodern Belch tussled obscenely with A Sugar Frosted Nutsack to be the most recursively maddening novel ever written, only to have A Sugar Frosted Nutsack trounce A Postmodern Belch with its unrelenting psychopoetics, barrelling towards the reader at Leyner-speed nine, crushing the twitchy snark of Nicholls’s apprenticework with its wayward humour, its sublimely tapestried weirdness, its hyperhyper reference framework, and its repeated use of the title A Sugar Frosted Nutsack. Who could have foreseen that A Postmodern Belch would crumble instantly in contact with such a formidable slice of literary doggerel? No one. Precisely no one.
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March 20, 2023Pathological Fear of Boredom, and Its Relation to Humor
Mark Leyner's book got a lot of media attention in 2012, partly because it was a "comeback" effort, and partly because he is associated with the generation that includes David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. (There is a YouTube video of an old episode of "Charlie Rose" with Leyner, Wallace, and Franzen as the guests, made before Franzen was widely known.)
The reviews I saw praised Leyner mainly for going there: he says things and writes in ways that are not usually permitted in literary novels. (One reviewer put it that way: he was astonished at what he read, and wondered, "Is that permitted?") People say his writing is virtuoso, brilliant. They find him hilarious; reviewers mention how they laughed -- often, loudly, even continuously. They say his work makes other novels seem old-fashioned. Here is one of the 2012 Amazon reviews, in full:
"It took me exactly 3 pages of this book to make me realize that I've been ever so slightly bored with every other book I've read... since Leyner's last book. This is the divine comedy."
I won't deny I smiled a number of times reading the book: it would be hard not to smile when Leyner is telling us, for example, that J.D. Salinger wrote an article with A.J. Foyt and published it in "Highlights for Children." The book's central conceit, that the universe is run by a white van-load full of gods who appeared about 14 billion years ago and are obsessed with someone named Ike who lives in New Jersey, is the kind of opening move that announces -- all by itself, with no need for an accompanying novel -- that as soon as any rule of novel writing, or even of propriety, appears, it will be happily broken.
But I never laughed reading "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack." I tried to picture the sort of reader Leyner was imagining: such a person would come to the novel with their head filled with Austen, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Forster, Greene, Roth, Updike, and especially Franzen, Ford, McCarthy, Proulx... and on the first page they'd be shocked, dismayed, and delighted. (This is one reason, I think, why Wallace once envied Leyner, even though Wallace tried hard not to depend on fireworks, paranoia, virtuoso writing, and hallucigenic scenarios.)
It is more difficult to imagine the kind of reader for whom the whole book is funny, joke after joke. Several people hinted that the book became boring, but those who liked "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack" tended to identify it as a kind of revelation of the inherently boring nature of other people's books. Boredom figures in Leyner's work in a complicated way; for me, thinking about boredom was the most interesting part of reading.
The book staves off whatever might count as boredom by keeping up a nearly uniform pitch of hysteria. There are only a few moments in which the narrator's voice relaxes, and the double exclamation marks, italics, pop culture references, scattered knowing citations, Pynchonesque paranoia, Barth-like meta-references, all around goofiness, and boldface celebrity names let up just a little. One such passage is a list of things that Ike, the hero, loved about his childhood. Without its context, that list would be a lyrical, unironic, nostalgic evocation of memories. In context, it's drowned out by the gods and their craziness. Another passage, also a list, is about what men can understand about women. It turns out it was plagiarized from "O," Oprah's magazine. The novel itself admits that, and it's also credited in the endpapers. Out of context, that list would be sincere and heartfelt (as I'm assuming it was in "O"); in the novel it's said that people who take the list that way are hard to figure out.
What, then, could count as boredom? Here are two possible positions:
1. Boredom might happen when you don't need to be shocked. For me, it's the flood of writing itself that became boring, mainly because it was nearly unmodulated, and also because most jokes weren't funny. And that, in turn, was because I am used to unexpected juxtapositions of high and low culture, past and present, sense and nonsense, seriousness and irony: those kinds of jolts were a stock in trade of first-generation postmodernism. If you find it humorous to see Mircea Eliade's name juxtaposed with the name the god of testicles, that may be because you are anxious about the values and meanings of serious culture, philosophy, high art, and so forth, so it's a relief to see them deflated. If you aren't anxious, then it isn't especially funny to see those juxtapositions.
2. Boredom might be an intrinsic quality of kitsch. Readers who are energized by a continuous barrage of wild writing are, I think, good examples of what the philosopher Karsten Harries called the "kitsch economy." In kitsch, what matters is effects, and in each repetition they have to be done more intensely, more densely, than before. The "kitsch economy" is tied to perpetual inflation: each new novel, film, painting, or composition has to have more special effects than the one before, because the effect of each innovation -- the hit, the force of the drug -- wears off. Readers who found that Leyner made other novelists boring might have found themselves needing his next book to be more outrageous.
Boredom and its opposites (attention, immersion, absorption) are one of the themes that makes the book interesting. Another is what counts as funny, and why. Those were the kinds of things I was thinking of as I read. The book's repetitiveness, which some reviewers criticized, is part of the whole game: if what matters is to be entertained continuously, with no letup, and if one of the ways of accomplishing that is to be perverse and badly behaved, then what better strategy than to make repetition part of the plot? The book would have been twice as good if it had been twice as long. Or, in the spirit of Oulipo: it would have been a thousand times as good if it'd been a thousand times longer.
Mark Leyner's book got a lot of media attention in 2012, partly because it was a "comeback" effort, and partly because he is associated with the generation that includes David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. (There is a YouTube video of an old episode of "Charlie Rose" with Leyner, Wallace, and Franzen as the guests, made before Franzen was widely known.)
The reviews I saw praised Leyner mainly for going there: he says things and writes in ways that are not usually permitted in literary novels. (One reviewer put it that way: he was astonished at what he read, and wondered, "Is that permitted?") People say his writing is virtuoso, brilliant. They find him hilarious; reviewers mention how they laughed -- often, loudly, even continuously. They say his work makes other novels seem old-fashioned. Here is one of the 2012 Amazon reviews, in full:
"It took me exactly 3 pages of this book to make me realize that I've been ever so slightly bored with every other book I've read... since Leyner's last book. This is the divine comedy."
I won't deny I smiled a number of times reading the book: it would be hard not to smile when Leyner is telling us, for example, that J.D. Salinger wrote an article with A.J. Foyt and published it in "Highlights for Children." The book's central conceit, that the universe is run by a white van-load full of gods who appeared about 14 billion years ago and are obsessed with someone named Ike who lives in New Jersey, is the kind of opening move that announces -- all by itself, with no need for an accompanying novel -- that as soon as any rule of novel writing, or even of propriety, appears, it will be happily broken.
But I never laughed reading "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack." I tried to picture the sort of reader Leyner was imagining: such a person would come to the novel with their head filled with Austen, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Forster, Greene, Roth, Updike, and especially Franzen, Ford, McCarthy, Proulx... and on the first page they'd be shocked, dismayed, and delighted. (This is one reason, I think, why Wallace once envied Leyner, even though Wallace tried hard not to depend on fireworks, paranoia, virtuoso writing, and hallucigenic scenarios.)
It is more difficult to imagine the kind of reader for whom the whole book is funny, joke after joke. Several people hinted that the book became boring, but those who liked "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack" tended to identify it as a kind of revelation of the inherently boring nature of other people's books. Boredom figures in Leyner's work in a complicated way; for me, thinking about boredom was the most interesting part of reading.
The book staves off whatever might count as boredom by keeping up a nearly uniform pitch of hysteria. There are only a few moments in which the narrator's voice relaxes, and the double exclamation marks, italics, pop culture references, scattered knowing citations, Pynchonesque paranoia, Barth-like meta-references, all around goofiness, and boldface celebrity names let up just a little. One such passage is a list of things that Ike, the hero, loved about his childhood. Without its context, that list would be a lyrical, unironic, nostalgic evocation of memories. In context, it's drowned out by the gods and their craziness. Another passage, also a list, is about what men can understand about women. It turns out it was plagiarized from "O," Oprah's magazine. The novel itself admits that, and it's also credited in the endpapers. Out of context, that list would be sincere and heartfelt (as I'm assuming it was in "O"); in the novel it's said that people who take the list that way are hard to figure out.
What, then, could count as boredom? Here are two possible positions:
1. Boredom might happen when you don't need to be shocked. For me, it's the flood of writing itself that became boring, mainly because it was nearly unmodulated, and also because most jokes weren't funny. And that, in turn, was because I am used to unexpected juxtapositions of high and low culture, past and present, sense and nonsense, seriousness and irony: those kinds of jolts were a stock in trade of first-generation postmodernism. If you find it humorous to see Mircea Eliade's name juxtaposed with the name the god of testicles, that may be because you are anxious about the values and meanings of serious culture, philosophy, high art, and so forth, so it's a relief to see them deflated. If you aren't anxious, then it isn't especially funny to see those juxtapositions.
2. Boredom might be an intrinsic quality of kitsch. Readers who are energized by a continuous barrage of wild writing are, I think, good examples of what the philosopher Karsten Harries called the "kitsch economy." In kitsch, what matters is effects, and in each repetition they have to be done more intensely, more densely, than before. The "kitsch economy" is tied to perpetual inflation: each new novel, film, painting, or composition has to have more special effects than the one before, because the effect of each innovation -- the hit, the force of the drug -- wears off. Readers who found that Leyner made other novelists boring might have found themselves needing his next book to be more outrageous.
Boredom and its opposites (attention, immersion, absorption) are one of the themes that makes the book interesting. Another is what counts as funny, and why. Those were the kinds of things I was thinking of as I read. The book's repetitiveness, which some reviewers criticized, is part of the whole game: if what matters is to be entertained continuously, with no letup, and if one of the ways of accomplishing that is to be perverse and badly behaved, then what better strategy than to make repetition part of the plot? The book would have been twice as good if it had been twice as long. Or, in the spirit of Oulipo: it would have been a thousand times as good if it'd been a thousand times longer.
July 20, 2012
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
It would not be off the mark to call Mark Leyner the "King of the Bizarro Authors," given that he is one of the only practitioners in the whole country of this "Monty Python meets Psychobilly" subgenre to regularly score lucrative contracts with large mainstream publishers, and to be featured in such national media outlets as Entertainment Weekly. And now after a long hiatus, he's finally back with a new novel, the appropriately absurdist The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; and after reading through this latest inspired piece of weirdness, it's easy to see why he's the undisputed king of this particular genre, because the pure sense of imagination that Leyner brings to the table far outstrips almost anything that almost any other American bizarro author is writing these days. Ostensibly about a group of ancient gods that are still around to meddle in human affairs, now living in a penthouse apartment at the top of a Dubai skyscraper, like most bizarro novels this is merely chapter-one window-dressing so that the marketing people have something to write on the dust jacket, with the story quickly expanding so to eventually be about everything in the world and nothing all at the same time, a gloriously chaotic wallowing in the pure joy of language itself, a proud literary tradition that (with a little squinting) can be directly traced all the way back to G.K. Chesterton at the end of the Victorian Age. Granted, this is a bawdy and hyperactive version of Chesterton, but I believe that proto-nerd would highly approve of the work of Mark Leyner; and so will fans of Douglas Adams, Will Self, David David Katzman and Hunter S. Thompson, a clever stream-of-consciousness fairytale that's best experienced by passing it quickly from one ear through the other, and letting the burningly unique images seer a tattoo on the back of your psychic retinas.
Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for fans of bizarro fiction
It would not be off the mark to call Mark Leyner the "King of the Bizarro Authors," given that he is one of the only practitioners in the whole country of this "Monty Python meets Psychobilly" subgenre to regularly score lucrative contracts with large mainstream publishers, and to be featured in such national media outlets as Entertainment Weekly. And now after a long hiatus, he's finally back with a new novel, the appropriately absurdist The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; and after reading through this latest inspired piece of weirdness, it's easy to see why he's the undisputed king of this particular genre, because the pure sense of imagination that Leyner brings to the table far outstrips almost anything that almost any other American bizarro author is writing these days. Ostensibly about a group of ancient gods that are still around to meddle in human affairs, now living in a penthouse apartment at the top of a Dubai skyscraper, like most bizarro novels this is merely chapter-one window-dressing so that the marketing people have something to write on the dust jacket, with the story quickly expanding so to eventually be about everything in the world and nothing all at the same time, a gloriously chaotic wallowing in the pure joy of language itself, a proud literary tradition that (with a little squinting) can be directly traced all the way back to G.K. Chesterton at the end of the Victorian Age. Granted, this is a bawdy and hyperactive version of Chesterton, but I believe that proto-nerd would highly approve of the work of Mark Leyner; and so will fans of Douglas Adams, Will Self, David David Katzman and Hunter S. Thompson, a clever stream-of-consciousness fairytale that's best experienced by passing it quickly from one ear through the other, and letting the burningly unique images seer a tattoo on the back of your psychic retinas.
Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for fans of bizarro fiction
April 4, 2012
If you've never read Mark Leyner, this book is not the place to start. Having stepped away from fiction writing for 15 years, this work feels like Leyner is running as fast as he can to catch-up with his last work (which I found pretty amazing) "The Tetherballs of Bouganville". There were a few times in the book where I just gave up on everything: the story, the characters, the irony, the satire - it just felt like the jumbled mind of a lunatic.
If it is true that there is a razor's edge between insanity and genius, then this book falls on the former. "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", the latter. Read that, not this.
If it is true that there is a razor's edge between insanity and genius, then this book falls on the former. "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", the latter. Read that, not this.
December 26, 2021
Certainly interesting and surely vomited rather than written.
It’s a view of all things through Covid tinted spectacles. Or any fever-inducing illness.
It’s a view of all things through Covid tinted spectacles. Or any fever-inducing illness.
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November 12, 2014I won this book and wasn't going to read it and I wish I didn't waste 10mins of my life trying to. This book is just absolutely horrendous. From the beginning I was totally lost and 15 pages in I was like there's no way I'm reading anymore of this. It's total garbage and just a bunch of random crap with no logical reasoning of being mentioned whatsoever. I can be random but this guy abuses the privilege. The fact that a guy got this published and yet I as an author continue to struggle makes me sick. This author should not be allowed to write a book ever again, I give it no stars, no class and no credit at all and to the author, may god have mercy on your soul.
September 20, 2012
I understand this is not supposed to be a "normal" book. I get the symbolism of the repetitive nature, making it sound like the chorus in a real song, the references to Freud, etc. I get that nonlinear storytelling is "cool" these days. I get that mile-a-minute pop culture references are supposed to pass for humor. And I get the dichotomy between the completely vapid content and the stuffy language of the faux-academic analyses. This book is trying to be edgy and hip and different. But what it's really doing is what Maeby did with The Oceanwalker... Make it so confusing that people will say they love it because they're afraid to look dumb.
I guess I'm dumb. Oh well. I will still die happy if I never have to hear the phrase "military grade ass-cheese" again.
I guess I'm dumb. Oh well. I will still die happy if I never have to hear the phrase "military grade ass-cheese" again.
March 19, 2012
I won The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in a giveaway and was very excited because it sounded so interesting. After I won, I realized that it only had 2 stars here on Goodreads and all the reviews talked about how horrible it was...
Me? I thought it was awesome and gave it 4 stars. I'd give it 5 stars if my vocabulary was better. If Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman and a thesaurus got stoned (on Gravy) and had an orgy, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack would be the result. Forget your expectations and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Me? I thought it was awesome and gave it 4 stars. I'd give it 5 stars if my vocabulary was better. If Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman and a thesaurus got stoned (on Gravy) and had an orgy, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack would be the result. Forget your expectations and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
July 7, 2013
This is just bad period. I really wanted to give this a try however maybe I made the mistake of reading this after reading one Stephen King book and then starting another one to keep my brain from running out of my ears. you know maybe if I read something good in between the pages that actually drove me to hit myself on the head because of the sheer stupidity or utter nonsense I could get to the point or end rather Sorry bud nothing doing. I do not think you are some huge genius because you use large words that have obviously been pulled from a dictionary and/or thesaurus. i mean I suppose I get the point flip the bird to the written word by saying you simply will not follow the rules, so you ramble, digress, and have run on sentences, that would probably send many high school and college English teachers into convulsions. Thus resulting in us the reader bowing to your sheer genius no just no. maybe had you thrown in a plot. Fail. PS really this is zero stars. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=C3JzbW...
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March 2, 2021Many years ago, I learned about Mark Leyner from David Foster Wallace, who characterized Leyner as a hot-shit young writer. This was peculiar to me, because I knew and know no one who read or talked about Leyner. Maybe he was one of those things best left in the heady years around the end of history, like Laura Ashley sofa sets and training montages.
The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack retains that hyper-referential Gen-X style, albeit updated to include references to Death Cab for Cutie and shit. This is the type of book where the usual metric for quality is whether or not qualifies as a “blast and a half” to read. At times, The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack indeed constituted at least a blast, maybe even a blast and a half, with is plotline about a pantheon of horny-on-main deities centerd around a sort of epic version of the old vaudevillean Aristocrats joke. I didn't laff, but I don't generally laff at books (in the same way I don't laff at the Aristocrats joke, but I did laff at the documentary The Aristocrats). But I vibed.
The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack retains that hyper-referential Gen-X style, albeit updated to include references to Death Cab for Cutie and shit. This is the type of book where the usual metric for quality is whether or not qualifies as a “blast and a half” to read. At times, The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack indeed constituted at least a blast, maybe even a blast and a half, with is plotline about a pantheon of horny-on-main deities centerd around a sort of epic version of the old vaudevillean Aristocrats joke. I didn't laff, but I don't generally laff at books (in the same way I don't laff at the Aristocrats joke, but I did laff at the documentary The Aristocrats). But I vibed.
December 21, 2014
To say this is funny is to say that Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, is inconsiderate of his populace. To say this is original is to say that audio technicians for Olympics coverage occasionally use orchestral pieces with somewhat sentimental string parts.
Mark Leyner is daring and talented and that rarest of literary figures: the iconoclast respected by all the stalwart critics. Try something new and different. Try this "fucked-up caffeinated cacophony...with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying cliches, its over-wrought angst, all its gnomic non sequitors, all its off-putting adolescent scatalogy and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetitive compulson" (TSFN jokingly describing itself).
Mark Leyner is daring and talented and that rarest of literary figures: the iconoclast respected by all the stalwart critics. Try something new and different. Try this "fucked-up caffeinated cacophony...with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying cliches, its over-wrought angst, all its gnomic non sequitors, all its off-putting adolescent scatalogy and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud's repetitive compulson" (TSFN jokingly describing itself).
April 16, 2012
This book is wild. I don't think there is any other way to describe it. Inventive, metafictional, strange, funny, insightful, and such would all be good choices as well though. There are so many weird things linked together in this novel, god myth structures, pop culture mass consciousness, and more. It's impossible to classify yet it is amazingly enjoyable to read. Leyner is truly writing out on his own here, though it is a blast to follow along.
May 14, 2012
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack sits on the bookseller’s shelves, its stalwart spine erect, its freshly pressed pages waving gently in the air conditioning in a silent artifice of shikantaza as panting bibliophiles masturbate on the floor from the broadest horizon of the vanishing point as they imbue The Sugar Frosted Nutsack with the pearly shimmer of their devotion.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is a self-aware entity of infinite transmogrifying digressions emanating from two or three concrete images which is constantly edited by interference of the Observer Effect by The Reader, a quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, mentally banging images of aluminum rings of blind and spaced bards tapping on jerry cans of orange soda against The Sugar Frosted Nutsack induced Tourette’s as to maintain the epic’s rhythm more resembling Detroit house music than a typical narrative.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Review has emerged as being the definitive opinion of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, or, as the epic is currently known as, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack. The Reviewer unusually known as zxvasdf, posture struck in an elegant poise, the horn-rimmed enclosures of his glasses reflecting the pipe smoke whose draughts escape a meerschaum bowl, observes the epic and its explosion of pointillism nesting on the surface of a chestnut end table.
“The man is a genius,” states The Reviewer in the definitive canonical version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Review or T.S.F.N.S.R., as it currently is understood, but the opinion is attacked by a schism of his thought, believed to be an action perpetrated by that ever pervasive XOXO and his periodontal drill!
“Mark Leyner is channeling Gravy-laced methamphetamine bombed blind bards tapping aluminum rings against jerrycans of orange soda while spouting high speed gibberish as if in beat to Detroit House music.”
XOXO is at it again! A dissenting opinion splinters, and shards!
“Mark Leyner,” modifies The Reviewer (this sentence is now part of the definitive version of T.S.F.N.S.R. 2.0 as demanded by The Reader, that quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack, mentally banging images of aluminum rings of blind and spaced bards tapping on jerry cans of orange soda against The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack induced Tourette’s as to maintain the epic’s rhythm more resembling Detroit house music than a typical narrative), “is an infinite series of monkeys banging away at an infinite series of ancient Underwoods, only after XOXO has stolen his soul away to his hyperborean hermitage for God years of drugged sherbet cocktails and heavy teenage angst hickey cover.”
The Reader (a quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of the Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack) has argued that non-canonical additions, including this sentence, should be expunged, and failing that, be included as definitive while its soul is taken to a hyperborean hermitage to be plied with drugged sherbet and a God’s unreliable kisses.
As The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack sits on the bookseller’s shelves, its stalwart spine erect, its freshly pressed pages waving gently in the air conditioning in a silent artifice of shikantaza, panting bibliophiles masturbate on the floor from the broadest horizon of the vanishing point as they imbue the Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack with the pearly shimmer of their devotion.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is a self-aware entity of infinite transmogrifying digressions emanating from two or three concrete images which is constantly edited by interference of the Observer Effect by The Reader, a quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, mentally banging images of aluminum rings of blind and spaced bards tapping on jerry cans of orange soda against The Sugar Frosted Nutsack induced Tourette’s as to maintain the epic’s rhythm more resembling Detroit house music than a typical narrative.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Review has emerged as being the definitive opinion of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, or, as the epic is currently known as, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack. The Reviewer unusually known as zxvasdf, posture struck in an elegant poise, the horn-rimmed enclosures of his glasses reflecting the pipe smoke whose draughts escape a meerschaum bowl, observes the epic and its explosion of pointillism nesting on the surface of a chestnut end table.
“The man is a genius,” states The Reviewer in the definitive canonical version of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack Review or T.S.F.N.S.R., as it currently is understood, but the opinion is attacked by a schism of his thought, believed to be an action perpetrated by that ever pervasive XOXO and his periodontal drill!
“Mark Leyner is channeling Gravy-laced methamphetamine bombed blind bards tapping aluminum rings against jerrycans of orange soda while spouting high speed gibberish as if in beat to Detroit House music.”
XOXO is at it again! A dissenting opinion splinters, and shards!
“Mark Leyner,” modifies The Reviewer (this sentence is now part of the definitive version of T.S.F.N.S.R. 2.0 as demanded by The Reader, that quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack, mentally banging images of aluminum rings of blind and spaced bards tapping on jerry cans of orange soda against The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack induced Tourette’s as to maintain the epic’s rhythm more resembling Detroit house music than a typical narrative), “is an infinite series of monkeys banging away at an infinite series of ancient Underwoods, only after XOXO has stolen his soul away to his hyperborean hermitage for God years of drugged sherbet cocktails and heavy teenage angst hickey cover.”
The Reader (a quintessential construct encompassing all past, future, and present readers of the Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack) has argued that non-canonical additions, including this sentence, should be expunged, and failing that, be included as definitive while its soul is taken to a hyperborean hermitage to be plied with drugged sherbet and a God’s unreliable kisses.
As The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack sits on the bookseller’s shelves, its stalwart spine erect, its freshly pressed pages waving gently in the air conditioning in a silent artifice of shikantaza, panting bibliophiles masturbate on the floor from the broadest horizon of the vanishing point as they imbue the Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack with the pearly shimmer of their devotion.
May 6, 2012
This is quite possibly the weirdest book I have ever read, and I have read some pretty weird shit.
I don't even know if this is actually a novel or not. If I'm understanding it properly, and I very well may not be, it's basically a discussion and dissection of a fictional epic called "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack", which in ITSELF is the very epic that they are discussing. Also, the very book itself (and the epic that it's about (which in itself is also the epic)) may be subject to manipulation by an (evil?) God known as XOXO, who delights in spreading misinformation and general chaos.
At some point in the book, it's no longer actually about "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack" and is instead about "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack". I'm not sure at which point exactly this happens. It's all a blur of medical factoids and dick jokes.
I don't even really know what else to say, except the book will be completely hilarious and awesome to probably less than 1% of the population, but the few people that DO get it will this it's TOTALLY HILARIOUS.
I am one of those people. Leyner had me sold at the phrase "military-grade ass-cheese", and no, I don't care if it's the same gag repeated several times throughout the book. In fact, it's almost as if he'd already though of that, and the very repetition of the phrase "military-grade ass-cheese" IS ACTUALLY PART OF THE PLOT.
I consider this a positive. If this does not sounds like a thing that would be awesome to you, then this book just isn't for you.
In fact, even if it DOES sound like a thing that would awesome to you, this book probably still isn't for you anyway!
I don't even know if this is actually a novel or not. If I'm understanding it properly, and I very well may not be, it's basically a discussion and dissection of a fictional epic called "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack", which in ITSELF is the very epic that they are discussing. Also, the very book itself (and the epic that it's about (which in itself is also the epic)) may be subject to manipulation by an (evil?) God known as XOXO, who delights in spreading misinformation and general chaos.
At some point in the book, it's no longer actually about "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack" and is instead about "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Creme de la Sack". I'm not sure at which point exactly this happens. It's all a blur of medical factoids and dick jokes.
I don't even really know what else to say, except the book will be completely hilarious and awesome to probably less than 1% of the population, but the few people that DO get it will this it's TOTALLY HILARIOUS.
I am one of those people. Leyner had me sold at the phrase "military-grade ass-cheese", and no, I don't care if it's the same gag repeated several times throughout the book. In fact, it's almost as if he'd already though of that, and the very repetition of the phrase "military-grade ass-cheese" IS ACTUALLY PART OF THE PLOT.
I consider this a positive. If this does not sounds like a thing that would be awesome to you, then this book just isn't for you.
In fact, even if it DOES sound like a thing that would awesome to you, this book probably still isn't for you anyway!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2019
I've never read Mark Leyner before, but I couldn't resist a title like The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. What a perfectly snarky phrase. Here's a sample from the opening chapter describing the arrival of the hungover elitist GODS to an empty earth.
It appears this novel has that rare and treasured combination of brilliant language, completely unique characters, and a proudly displayed flair for the absurd with a complete lack of pretention. The closest comparison I can make is the brilliant Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman.
For the first time in a long time, I am thrilled and excited about a new read.
And because they were omniscient and so tight knit,
they could be very adolescent and pretentious in the way they
flaunted their superiority. It wouldn't be unusual for a God to use
Ningdu Chinese, Etruscan, Ket (a moribund language spoken by just
five hundred people in central Siberia), Mexican Mafia prison code,
Klingon, dolphin echolocation clicks, ant pheromones, and honeybee
dance steps-all in one sentence. It's the kind of thing where
you'd be like, was that really necessary?
It appears this novel has that rare and treasured combination of brilliant language, completely unique characters, and a proudly displayed flair for the absurd with a complete lack of pretention. The closest comparison I can make is the brilliant Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman.
For the first time in a long time, I am thrilled and excited about a new read.
January 16, 2013
Mark Leyner's The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is about a metatextual epic that absorbs and incorporates everything that comments on it, to the point where the only thing left of the original are fragments buried in reams of nonsensical pomo lit theory jargon. It's an interesting premise, but one that doesn't really lend itself to a novel-length exploration. By the time you reach page 30 it's already starting to feel a bit sweaty, by page 240 it's definitely outworn its welcome. At times I was nonplussed, confused, and infuriated before eventually settling on a sort of bored resignation. You really don't want someone to finish your novel with a feeling of bored resignation.
Part of the problem is that Mark Leyner thinks his writing is clever and charming, but it's really just relentlessly annoying. While he does have the occasional shockingly funny image or turn of phrase they're hard to find when they're buried in paragraphs of mindless nonsense. One of the keys to comedy is timing. You can't just go full speed ahead at all times. You have to take a break now and then.
Part of the problem is that Mark Leyner thinks his writing is clever and charming, but it's really just relentlessly annoying. While he does have the occasional shockingly funny image or turn of phrase they're hard to find when they're buried in paragraphs of mindless nonsense. One of the keys to comedy is timing. You can't just go full speed ahead at all times. You have to take a break now and then.
I'n not necessarily opposed to nonsense. Hell, I love Alfred Jarry and Ring Lardner. One of my favorite novels from last year was Nicholson Baker's House of Holes. But there's a trick to making nonsense palatable and Leyner doesn't have it.
October 14, 2014
Perhaps the best way I’ve come up with to describe The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is as if Hesiod’s Theogony was being read out to you by someone who has just taken ecstasy and stayed up all night watching cartoons, or if The Rape of the Lock was made into a Pixar movie and set in the world of the Jersey Shore. I’d whole-heartedly recommend everyone reading the prologue of the book at least, some of which has been hosted online by Vice Magazine. Here, Leyner lays out his new pantheon of gods, who have names that recall lucha libre stars or characters in turn of the century comic strips: El Brazo, the God of Virility, God of Pornography, God of Urology; Fast-Cooking Ali, the God of Platitudes and the inventor of “woman’s ass”; Mogul Magoo, whose portfolio originally encompassed only bubbles, but eventually came to include any time something envelops something else; La Felina, Goddess of the Downtrodden, the Despised Ones and the Sans-culottes. There are many others, too many to list here, but a lot of the fun of the book comes from the hilariously low-key adventures of these deities.
Check out the rest of my review at This Nerding Life:
http://thisnerdinglife.com/2014/10/14...
Check out the rest of my review at This Nerding Life:
http://thisnerdinglife.com/2014/10/14...
December 5, 2021
Ike Karton forever.
S'il est au cœur - du moins un temps - des passions des Dieux visibles et invisibles qui nous entourent, l'imagination débridée de Mark Leyner ne peut être comparée qu'à l'antithèse de son héros précédent, Mark Leyner, dans le non moins incroyable Mégalomachine.
Bref, du très, très bon. Du très, très lourd. Du très très fort. Un peu comme un cours de philosophie platonicienne d'une profondeur confondante qui serait déclamée par un Homer Simpson sous amphétamines.
S'il est au cœur - du moins un temps - des passions des Dieux visibles et invisibles qui nous entourent, l'imagination débridée de Mark Leyner ne peut être comparée qu'à l'antithèse de son héros précédent, Mark Leyner, dans le non moins incroyable Mégalomachine.
Bref, du très, très bon. Du très, très lourd. Du très très fort. Un peu comme un cours de philosophie platonicienne d'une profondeur confondante qui serait déclamée par un Homer Simpson sous amphétamines.
August 8, 2016
I think at a different age I would have enjoyed this but a year of Donald Trump running for president has made bloviating crotch-obsession lose its luster for me, regardless of cleverness.
September 18, 2025
At once impressive and tedious, like a long solo by a rock drummer.
September 30, 2013
It's entirely reasonable to hate this book.
I don't hate it, but I can understand.
Mark Leyner has unleashed upon the world a version of American Gods, but as told by that one guy on the bus dressed in bed sheets. It's a dense, near-incomprehensible look at the world as created by a van of misfit gods and goddesses after the mother of all hangovers. Their obsession, and the focus of this oral tale performed by drug-addled bards, is Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher who dreams of suicide-by-cop and sweaty women. His tale is influenced by the whims of the Gods, particularly La Felina, the Goddess of Underdogs and Deformities, whose orgasms over Ike's indefatigable mediocrity have drowned out civilizations; and XOXO, God of Perversion, who keeps interjecting completely obscene imaginings that clash with the modest sensibilities of the Karton family, such as "he pumped her shiksa ass full of hot Jew jizz." Filthy, amirite? But charming, in a way. XOXO wants to destroy the narrative, and his attempts are all assimilated into the body of the narrative, as are all the various interpretations and belief systems therein, culminating in an ending at odds with the projections of the text, and leaving readers wondering WTF happened, and if they'll ever feel clean again.
I wasn't sure I could finish this book. But, after I got used to the cadence of Leyner's word salad bullshit, I found the ideas and tourettic outbursts of sex and violence to be quite charming. Leyner is very clearly playing with the notion of an oral tale: this story is being constantly edited and revised by bards (especially since there is an overt tradition of drug addiction, beheadings, and wife-snatching among their ranks), and by the vengeful XOXO, who does not appreciate La Felina's obsession with the underwhelming Ike Karton. There are seemingly benign events that spiral into holiness through the whims of the narrators, leaving the reader with a glaring sense of its own artifice. It's like the Holy Bible: King James Version, only with slightly less murder.
There were times, however, when I felt overwhelmed by Leyner's "craft." Leyner is so conscious of his own weirdness, that at times, it felt like he was just trying too hard. Like he got drunk on rye whiskey, and started writing copy (which, arguably, is entirely indicative of this book). There really is no story here; the style is the story.
Which, you know, is fine. But you can hate it if you want.
Buy this title from Powell's Books.
I don't hate it, but I can understand.
Mark Leyner has unleashed upon the world a version of American Gods, but as told by that one guy on the bus dressed in bed sheets. It's a dense, near-incomprehensible look at the world as created by a van of misfit gods and goddesses after the mother of all hangovers. Their obsession, and the focus of this oral tale performed by drug-addled bards, is Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher who dreams of suicide-by-cop and sweaty women. His tale is influenced by the whims of the Gods, particularly La Felina, the Goddess of Underdogs and Deformities, whose orgasms over Ike's indefatigable mediocrity have drowned out civilizations; and XOXO, God of Perversion, who keeps interjecting completely obscene imaginings that clash with the modest sensibilities of the Karton family, such as "he pumped her shiksa ass full of hot Jew jizz." Filthy, amirite? But charming, in a way. XOXO wants to destroy the narrative, and his attempts are all assimilated into the body of the narrative, as are all the various interpretations and belief systems therein, culminating in an ending at odds with the projections of the text, and leaving readers wondering WTF happened, and if they'll ever feel clean again.
I wasn't sure I could finish this book. But, after I got used to the cadence of Leyner's word salad bullshit, I found the ideas and tourettic outbursts of sex and violence to be quite charming. Leyner is very clearly playing with the notion of an oral tale: this story is being constantly edited and revised by bards (especially since there is an overt tradition of drug addiction, beheadings, and wife-snatching among their ranks), and by the vengeful XOXO, who does not appreciate La Felina's obsession with the underwhelming Ike Karton. There are seemingly benign events that spiral into holiness through the whims of the narrators, leaving the reader with a glaring sense of its own artifice. It's like the Holy Bible: King James Version, only with slightly less murder.
There were times, however, when I felt overwhelmed by Leyner's "craft." Leyner is so conscious of his own weirdness, that at times, it felt like he was just trying too hard. Like he got drunk on rye whiskey, and started writing copy (which, arguably, is entirely indicative of this book). There really is no story here; the style is the story.
Which, you know, is fine. But you can hate it if you want.
Buy this title from Powell's Books.
July 2, 2014
This is a huge comeback for Markie - I think it will be amazing for the people who love his writing to have this new book in the oeuvre and it should also be a good way for new readers to see that Leyner can write like no one else. It's a landmark book - for the faithful and for the people who are lucky enough to stumble upon it or have the fortunate serendipity to be introduced to Leyner's Nutsack.
Any time a writer breaks the mold the way Leyner likes to, it makes for great art, the way Burroughs did and the way Charlie Kaufman does (Adaptation, Schenecdoche, NY, etc.). Leyner does it in a unique and fully liberated style that is his own brand of humor. It expands the horizons and inspires me, in particular, to want to continue to write offbeat, non-linear, gonzo literature, rather than the safe novels of Lethem, Chabon, Eggers, et al. The safe, marketable stuff is just too calculated for achieving big profits. Literature has to be calculated for something - but calculating for marketability seems crude and not the point of literature at all, ultimately. Mercurial originality and story come first, not profits - but most novelists today are looking for the golden goose - a "career", not something that calls their creativity to new places or real risk-taking. They smell money, even if the reality is that most writers don't make a real living, the same way actors don't either.
To break the slave caste in this world, we need to do something that hasn't been done before, which is what Leyner does with his writing.
Guillotine the shittier celebs is a good start, according to Leyner, in true Mad magazine-style iconoclasm, no limits/no boundaries - and it's hard to disagree. Even if it's all in good fun.
(Incidentally, I do understand why a few people don't understand this book. It's not stupidity, although an argument could easily be made for that. It's just being used to straight formula narrative. I guess it's laziness. Like wanting to watch your favorite show or nothing at all.)
Any time a writer breaks the mold the way Leyner likes to, it makes for great art, the way Burroughs did and the way Charlie Kaufman does (Adaptation, Schenecdoche, NY, etc.). Leyner does it in a unique and fully liberated style that is his own brand of humor. It expands the horizons and inspires me, in particular, to want to continue to write offbeat, non-linear, gonzo literature, rather than the safe novels of Lethem, Chabon, Eggers, et al. The safe, marketable stuff is just too calculated for achieving big profits. Literature has to be calculated for something - but calculating for marketability seems crude and not the point of literature at all, ultimately. Mercurial originality and story come first, not profits - but most novelists today are looking for the golden goose - a "career", not something that calls their creativity to new places or real risk-taking. They smell money, even if the reality is that most writers don't make a real living, the same way actors don't either.
To break the slave caste in this world, we need to do something that hasn't been done before, which is what Leyner does with his writing.
Guillotine the shittier celebs is a good start, according to Leyner, in true Mad magazine-style iconoclasm, no limits/no boundaries - and it's hard to disagree. Even if it's all in good fun.
(Incidentally, I do understand why a few people don't understand this book. It's not stupidity, although an argument could easily be made for that. It's just being used to straight formula narrative. I guess it's laziness. Like wanting to watch your favorite show or nothing at all.)
November 14, 2012
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has the distinction of being as close to "metafiction" in a pure sense as one is likely to ever get, with recursive fractal curlicues redoubling constantly such that, as with some poetry, you can anticipate entire stanzas, but also constantly filling in more detail, as in discussions of Mandelbrot and the infinitely long coastline of Great Britain.
But there is also a heart at the center, suggesting that the closest movie analogue is actually Mulholland Drive rather something much more obvious at first glance, like Detention.
Or, to put it another way, as it moves from a story of a character struggling to be an individual, and heroic in his own way, to the story of everybody trying to frame that story, it lends heroism to that character simply by dint of his being the center of the constantly re-framed story. Does that make sense?
Further, it references this by offering that some have postulated that that character has, in fact, been a statue the entire time, thus auto-critiquing its own narrative point and structure.
And it has all of the wacky Leyner hijinx his other fiction does: too many pop-culture references to count, a genuinely astounding vocabulary and breadth of knowledge that seems almost wasteful, and astonishing imagination matched with descriptions that manage to convey visual imagery pretty much unmatched anywhere else.
As with everything that is so successful a deconstruction, though, it ends up empty except for the experience.
But there is also a heart at the center, suggesting that the closest movie analogue is actually Mulholland Drive rather something much more obvious at first glance, like Detention.
Or, to put it another way, as it moves from a story of a character struggling to be an individual, and heroic in his own way, to the story of everybody trying to frame that story, it lends heroism to that character simply by dint of his being the center of the constantly re-framed story. Does that make sense?
Further, it references this by offering that some have postulated that that character has, in fact, been a statue the entire time, thus auto-critiquing its own narrative point and structure.
And it has all of the wacky Leyner hijinx his other fiction does: too many pop-culture references to count, a genuinely astounding vocabulary and breadth of knowledge that seems almost wasteful, and astonishing imagination matched with descriptions that manage to convey visual imagery pretty much unmatched anywhere else.
As with everything that is so successful a deconstruction, though, it ends up empty except for the experience.
June 9, 2019
The first ~30 pages are actually pretty good: the history of the universe from the time before the Gods through their appearance, their battles for power, their Leyner-esque obsession with minor human celebrities and products, but from there on it feels like a contractual obligation made possible by the cut and paste keys. Whole chunks are repeated over and over, because that is the point, we are told: the story we are reading is being recited by generation after generation of "blind bards," each of whom has blinded himself after being abandoned by his wife for a blind bard. The blind bards are "itinerant," "really high," and their recitations are "garbled, fragmentary, repetitive, and almost inaudible." The epic incorporates all commentary about it, as well as "spiteful corruptions and interpolations" by the god XOXO, and perhaps through interpretation of the three-letter components of random automobile license plates. And then there's Ike, ostensibly the main character, who stands there on his stoop, "on the prow of his hermitage, and he strikes that contraposto pose in his white wifebeater, his torso totally ripped, his lustrous chestnut armpit hair wafting in the breeze, his head turned and inclined to the top floors of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from which the gaze of masturbating Goddesses casts him in a sugar frosted nimbus."
Okay, but then: put all of the above on infinite repeat. "The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it." (p. 89) Yep.
Okay, but then: put all of the above on infinite repeat. "The sheer mind-numbing repetitiveness of it." (p. 89) Yep.
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