November 23, 2020
In Leyner’s exhilarating and grotesque fever dream (after Gone with the Mind), an anthropologist’s account of a night spent in the field with his filmmaker daughter is read by an optometrist’s patient on an eye exam chart while a series of lenses are tested. The text, an ethnography written by an anthropologist about the country of Chalazia (where the anthropologist traveled with his filmmaker daughter, Gaby), is framed by a lecherous academic’s introduction, in which the anthropologist is labeled a “vile human being” and Gaby “fantastic” and “super-hot.” Gaby and her father spend a night at the Bar Pulpo in the “insanely violent” capital city, where a murderous band of loan-sharking mystics called the Chalazian Mafia Faction patrol the streets. Inside, patrons perform spoken-word karaoke based on the nation’s “ur-folktale” of a drunken father who hints to his daughter that he is dying by telling her a story of a dying father talking to his daughter; the tale concludes with the father performing a danse macabre and perishing. Gaby and her father zealously act out a version of this absurdist tale, and the pathos and joy of their bond resonate despite an onslaught of zany metafictional lewdnesss. Leyner’s ludic, distorted vision will reward readers intrepid enough to gaze into the optometrist’s refractor. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners.
November 15, 2020
Experimental storytelling keeps Leyner's latest novel whirling around. Narrative form is an ever malleable plaything in Leyner's ostentatiously acrobatic new novel. In the simplest possible terms, it's about a decrepit old anthropologist and his daughter at work on a book about the Chalazian Mafia Faction. Much of the novel is written in the form of a play, in which a patient narrates the action from the words that appear on her optometrist's eye chart. And so on. Bring a dictionary: The author delights in layering slabs of vocab onto the page ("In another version, the Father and Daughter (named Caesar and Little Madonna) are extinct, rodent-like mammals called multituberculates who've been kept in a cryostat for several years"). Folding in on itself in dizzying postmodern loops, setting up motifs and tweaking them in a jazzy frenzy, this is a book written by someone who knows how smart he is. It isn't so much an invitation as a challenge--if you finish this novel and like it, you must be a being of superior ambition and intelligence. Either that or you have a very high stake in your own literary endurance. Leyner delights in unusual, world-in-a-grain-of-sand narrative delivery; the action in his 2016 novel/memoir/all of the above, Gone With the Mind, takes place in a food court, where the character Mark Leyner holds forth and tells the story to his mom. On the one hand it's exciting when a book blows narrative convention to smithereens. That said, you don't read Leyner's latest so much as you work at it, one allusion-packed page at a time. There's no distinction between high and low culture here. One moment Leyner quotes a long passage from dance critic Jennifer Homans; a while later comes a riff on "Ryan Murphy's limited series about a nasal, anorexic, handcuffed Momofuku Noodle Bar dishwasher's festering toupee fetish." Because, why not? This is ultimately the book's saving grace: It is frequently, shamelessly funny enough to make the toil worthwhile. Bring your vocabulary chops with you; you'll be needing them.
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