The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner
Trevor Dodge

Mark Leyner. The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Harmony, 1997. 224 pp. $21.00.

The fading lights of Leyner’s first novel Et tu, Babe find us scrambling for cover in an infomercial gone ballistic, urging us to buy buy buy our way into TEAM LEYNER! world, if we so dare. Now, five years later, squeezed between the publication of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, a regular column in Esquire, and screenplay work on MTV’s Liquid Television, Leyner’s attention once again focuses on (surprise!) Mark Leyner. The Tetherballs of Bougainville catches up with Mark as your run-of-the-mill thirteen-year-old shirtless Versace pant-wearing wanna-be tetherball-playing master grammarian who lands a $250,000 a year lifetime award (for a screenplay that is yet to be written) on the same day his father is scheduled to be executed via lethal injection by the state of New Jersey for his escapades on PCP, and, yes, the very same day in which the said dose of lethal drugs fails to kill Papa Leyner (resulting only in a slight case of nausea) to whit young Mark has sex with the warden overseeing the execution. Welcome back to Mondo Leyner.
Tetherballs continues Leyner’s satire of the publishing industry’s marketing of hot new writers (i.e., Mark Leyner) as hip-flasking, pseudo-rock stars, equipped with the latest and greatest in literary weaponry to sedate an oftentimes hostile readership. Leyner refuses to settle down into any one narrative groove, taking us from what promises to be a fairly conventional novel into young Mark’s burgeoning screenplay, then abruptly into a fifty-plus-page review of the said screenplay/film that never was and may never be.
Burroughsian concerns of capital punishment, media hype, drug culture, and carnivalesque sex riddle Tetherballs, lampooning the very society which produced them with pie-in-the-face smart-assing. Such slapstick satire has made Leyner the lovable literary Tasmanian Devil he is with academic and mainstream audiences alike. At its sarcastic, self-reflexive best, Tetherballs is both postmodern product and parody, a full-blown riot in the coffers of the New York publishing industry and a testament to Leyner’s whipsmart comedic genius. [Trevor Dodge]