Rumors of Mark Leyner’s Disappearance Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

For acolytes of Mark Leyner, the 1990s were a time of abundance. No matter when new readers had joined the cult of Leyner—maybe it was after encountering My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist in 1990 or Et Tu, Babe in ’92 or Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog in ’95—the discovery of his fiction reliably sent such readers ecstatically scrambling both forward and backward in time: scouring his back catalog for earlier works while simultaneously scanning the horizon for the arrival of future installments.

For a time, those installments appeared with satisfying regularity, every two or three years or so. With each new book, up to The Tetherballs of Bougainville, in 1997, Leyner expanded our understanding of that neologistic descriptor that had increasingly become the only satisfying way to describe his work: Leyneresque.

And then: nothing. Nada. Silence.

Leyner, in a sense, disappeared.

This disappearance was not as deliberate and calculated as, say, the disappearances of Salinger and Pynchon. It’s just that the novels… stopped.

Leyner himself would occasionally poke his head up, as he did with the publication of his bestselling collections of medical curiosities, such as Why Do Men Have Nipples?, written in collaboration with Dr. Billy Goldberg. (And it must be said here that the phrase “as he did with the publication of his bestselling collections of medical curiosities, such as Why Do Men Have Nipples?, written in collaboration with Dr. Billy Goldberg” sounds itself like a line from a Leyner novel.)

This gap between new novels, which would eventually stretch to fifteen years, is a time Leyner later called “the interregnum.” As mysteries go, his long absence from fiction writing was not, it turns out, that mysterious. Leyner had gone Hollywood.

Which is to say: he’d sufficiently attracted the attention of powerful Hollywood types with overstuffed Hollywood wallets, in the grand tradition of great American novelists who are temporarily distracted and detoured from novels by the opportunities Hollywood affords.

For Leyner, this meant a long fallow period of fiction non-writing. When he did finally write a new novel—The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, in 2012—it was both recognizably Leyneresque and something new.

Was it funny? Yes. Strange? Of course. Was it…Leyner? Good question. As the experimental novelist Ben Marcus wrote in a New York Times review of Nutsack, “Mark Leyner writes in a genre that could be called Mark Leyner,” going on to describe this genre as “gun-to-the-head comedy delivered with a stratospheric I.Q.,” resulting in novels “created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent.”

In other words: Leyneresque.

And yet.

“It is very important to me, maybe excessively important to me, that what I do is unlike anything else,” Leyner said to me on the eve of the publication of Nutsack—and what’s notable about that novel, as well as the two that followed, Gone with the Mind in 2016 and Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit in 2021, is not how different they are from anyone else’s work (Leyner’s novels have always been different) but how different they are from the fiction that made him so famous in the 1990s.

These new novels—one is tempted to call them Late Period Leyner, or at least Later Period Leyner, for who knows how many periods Leyner will eventually have—are, of course, Leyneresque. But they also signal how the definition of that term has grown, evolved, expanded, necessarily burst its seams. If Leyner’s earlier novels were breakneck comic paeans sung to a supersize celebrity-engorged culture, these new novels felt…more fragile. More human. More aware of mortality. More—dare I say—poignant. With his earlier work, Leyner had been accused of many excesses, but poignancy was never one of them. He made you laugh, made you gasp, made you spit take, made you think, made you put down the book in gape-mouthed wonder—but had he ever made you cry?

Reader, these new books could make you cry.

In Nutsack, an unemployed butcher named Ike Karton contemplates a panoply of ersatz gods (albeit from his stoop in Hoboken, New Jersey). In Gone with the Mind, a son listens, rapt, as his elderly mother recounts the story of her life (albeit outside a Panda Express in a shopping mall food court). In Last Orgy, a father, nearing death, imparts what wisdom he’s collected to his beloved adult daughter (albeit in a spoken-word karaoke bar in the fictional country of Chalazia).

Pre-the interregnum, Leyner’s fiction had dazzled and careened and hummed with electric possibility. Post-the interregnum, Leyner’s fiction still snapped with the familiar currents, but it had also become both more recursive and more expansive, less concerned with pop-cultural hijinks and more intrigued by the application of that familiar Leyner toolkit—gun-to-the-head comedy, stratospheric IQ , a literary mind that seems to have no precedent—to the tender dilemmas of later life, such as aging, parenting, and death.

“He demonstrates how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left behind,” wrote Bruce Sterling in an admiring consideration of Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, “proving that fiction can be robust, provocative, and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment.”

Having laid his tools aside for a time, Leyner returned to reveal something surprising. Not that he could still do what no other novelist was attempting—for hadn’t that been the challenge and the achievement all along?—but that he could use those tools to accomplish something he hadn’t yet done himself. Novels that could break your heart. This reveal was well worth the wait.

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From A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader by Mark Leyner, edited by Rick Kisonak. Copyright © 2024. Available from Little, Brown & Company, a division of Hachette Book Group.