By all means, read "The Tetherballs of Bougainville" by Mark Leyner. It's cynical and spastic and hilarious. Leyner is like David Foster Wallace with his moral compass surgically removed and replaced with the complete works of Monty Python crossed with Thomas Pynchon if he were raised on MTV by rich Eurotrash in New Jersey. And he seems to be getting better; I've enjoyed each of his books more than the previous one, and this one is no exception. (Having read his first book after some of the more recent ones, I believe that it's not that I'm getting to know and/or like his style more, but that he's actually getting better.) This is a book of pyrotechnic linguistic ability, brilliant and incessant cultural references, stunning imagery (my favorite: Buddhist monks paginating toilet tissue, which is tossed off as part of a larger joke about interactive literature), and very little plot, although more than in his previous work. What plot there is is rife with internal inconsistencies, but they're so glaring as to be obviously intentional. (At least with Mark Leyner one can speak of internal inconsistencies so glaring as to be obviously intentional, as opposed to e.g. Philip K. Dick, whose work contains internal inconsistencies so glaring as to be obviously the result of the book having been written in a 48-hour amphetamine-fueled frenzy on deadline.) It is also a book of long, complicated sentences. I like that.

The Tetherballs of Bogainville is an odd book. To say the least! It is a so-called "genre-buster" in that it is one of a new class of novels that strive to be completely unclassifiable. Tetherballs does this fairly successfully.

The protagonist of the novel is Mark, a thirteen-year-old highly precocious boy who strides around in leather pants and no shirt. The entire novel is told from his perspective and it seems to be one bizarre tangent after another! I can't even remember a fraction of them. The humor is sophisticated, but so absurdist that I have found myself breaking out into guffaws at many points!

But because of it's ridiculous nature, tangents, etc., it is sometimes a bit hard to read - you start getting numb to the roller coaster ride that Leyner puts you on. So I have had to limit my exposure and put the book aside for a few days after reading each chapter or two.

This book is not for the weak of stomach or the uptight. However, if you have a good sense of humor and like your humor dry yet absurd, with a ton of references thrown in from the historical to the scientific, and you don't mind mixing your reality with a good deal of fantasy, you will find Tetherballs a fascinating read!

"The Tehterballs of Bougainville" while far from your standard fiction novel is still Mark Leyner's most accessable book and most plot driven.

The narrative is, as usual with Leyner, taut with jackhammer style bursts of narrative. Leyner dispenses with detail and spends his time creating vivid, drug-like situations.

A execution goes wrong and the person to be executed is given a letter explaining he will be killed at a later date of the state's choosing without his knowledge, it may be while he's eating, etc.
The young protagonist gets it on with the female warden in a drug stupored sex scene.
The young protagonist is constantly interrupting procedings to take calls from his agent.

These are Mark Leyner themes. They crop up in all his work but here he manages to keep the narrative together and still deliver on the super-charged writing style that at once reads like a travel poster and a crazed rant.

Read the excerpts to see if this appeals to you. Leyner has some readers that dismiss him as fast food, faux literature. You may be one of these people, or you may appreciate the style which some newer authors have taken note of or have been influenced by.

Read Leyner and then read Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk is still a dense, fast read but seems languid compared to Leyner. Intentional or not these authors remind me of one another for their terse prose and cutural obsessions. Leyner tends to stick to seemingly lighter subjects but in fact makes the same points with the use of broader comedy and absurdism.

A fun, quick read that can be enjoyed more than once.

The book in which Mark Leyner takes over the world. I've read everything by Leyner except "Tetherballs", and this is the pinnacle of the man's delerious madness, words flying together like ruin and recovery, spitting you high on Lincoln's morning breath, a grotesque electric calamity.

Who is this "Mark Leyner", why is he here, who brought him here, when and WHY? These are all questions attempting pathetically to be answered in this book. Luckily, that ends after the blank first page and segues into the total frontal lobotomy that is "Et Tu Babe". Comfortably resting somewhere on the borderline of complete incoherence and an organized encyclopedia of pop colture jokes, "Et Tu Babe" is bibliophied decay, masked as offbeat humor. The beginning paragraph will typefy the whole novel for you, and, if you're at all like me you'll just shrug and say "exactly...where the hell did he get that...anyway?" you'll read on an cease to care. An altogether ingenius book.....a must read.....go buy it...now! Or face the wrath of the little freakish kiddies performing plastic surgery on a peekid girl behind the canned goods section.

"Can I help you?"
"Yes," she said. "There's a new album out, I'm not sure what the name of it is... but it's the sound of two men lifting tremendous weights. I wish I could remember the name of it... oh, I was just talking to someone about it." --from "Et Tu, Babe"

If you were insulted by this paragraph, Mark Leyner isn't for you. If you sat there going, "what is going on here?"... Mark Leyner isn't for you.

If you wondered whether the weights are Nautilus or barbell, Mark Leyner is for you. The premise of the book is essentially that Mark Leyner has gone completely insane after the sales of his last, resoundingly popular volume. He's assembled a crack marketing team (1-900-T-Leyner) to promote his heavily-armed book tours. He practices self surgery. He has a book of nude photographs of himself, taken with a defense spy sattelite. And he gets a tatoo in radioactive ink on his internal organs to impress xray technicians. If it is to be said that this book has a plot, the plot is this: Mark Leyner is avoiding the FBI after stealing a vial of Abraham Lincoln's morning breath.

You now know all you need to buy this book. In fact, you probably already know whether it'll be dog-eared and read fanatically to your friends (mine is) or put it on the 'eventually pile.

(c) 1996 Danyel Fishe

The reviewer who gave this book only one star seems to have been anticipating a great number of punchlines in this book. There aren't that many. The book isn't based on "jokes" as such but on wry, pithy obsevations of the world at large, seen through the lens of Leyner's sense of the absurd. If you want "jokes," there are plenty of books like that out there. This book is not for a general audience anyway -- it takes a special outlook to even appreciate this book -- but for those with the mind set to appreciate this kind of humor, while it may not be falling-down funny, it is enjoyable.

Leyner leaves his "teeth imprints" with the 17 stories, plays, ramblings, and dedications contained within. With his Dennis Miller-ish vocabulary, Reyner remarks on the absurdity that is prevalent in modern life.

"The Mary Poppins' Kidnapping" throws a nod to the present censoring of the media. After viewing "Mary Poppins" three teenagers kidnap an English woman so that they could have a nanny. This triggers an across the board censorship for anything from "Mary Poppins" to "The Sound Of Music" stating that it's "...irresponsible to expose young people from middle- and low-income families to films depicting ostentatious affluence." which "...has the potential for provoking very explosive antisocial behavior."

"The (Illustrated) Body Politics" exposes that senators have hidden tattoos that represent their true standings on issues. In "Oh, Brother", two Melendez type brothers kill their parents with Howitzer shells, rocket-propelled grenades and 9mm Luger rounds then plead innocent using the "imperfect self-defense" concept. Stating that since their parents were understanding, supportive, and compassionate towards them, they didn't act like other parents and were covering up a plot to kill them so they struck first.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Writing like Christopher Moore with a newly acquired thesaurus, Leyner makes you laugh, cringe, and wonder. After possibly the longest dedication in written history the fun begins. Although he loves using big words don't be scared off. Bring a dictionary (optional) and an open mind (mandatory) and enjoy.

Nah, I think I would have to say that this book IS falling down funny, in fact I've never laughed so much. Burroughs, Thompson, I hear people compare Mark Leyner to so many beat or other post-modern writers, but I guarantee you that you will NEVER read something quite like this. I ended up reading at least half the book aloud to my roommate while tears were falling down my face from my fits of laughter. It may not be for everyone, but it is surely for anyone like myself that likes their humor fast, random, and fantastically absurd.

As you can see from the assortment of past reviews, people either love Mark Leyner or hate him (I wanted to use "get him" or "don't get him" but then this becomes snooty, and I'm trying to avoid snooty). He's different, what can I tell you? If you're a traditionalist who demands plot, theme and some semblence character development, you'll do better to move on past. However, if you fancy something a bit different, where the words and imagery take precedence over literature style-points, you've got to give Leyner a shot. I've found him to be especially popular with those who enjoy contemporary poetry, if that's more helpful. "My Cousin" was the first Leyner book I ever read and my mouth hung agape the whole way through- I never realized that anyone could get away with writing like that and be so great at it! Anyway, keep in mind, he's not for everyone, but if he's for you, you won't be sorry.

In the hyperkinetic style of writing, one Leyner has been doing for well over a decade now you have to take what happens as a fever dream or the author inviting you into his acid flashback world.

Mark Leyner has a gift for prose and uses it along with cultural icons to create smart, if sometimes near-incoherent fiction. I remember reading this to a class of computer music students after class and they were laughing so hard they were near tears.

Perhaps it is a love/hate thing but there is no denying Leyner can conjure up some witty situations and absurdist comedy. It isn't that Leyner is a bad writer, rather it is readers expectations that make "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist" polarizing. Leyner's metaphors are great fun, he does not spend much time with scenic description unless it has significant import to the story. The dialog is crisp and, well weird, but in a droll way. His choices of charaters and their stories are funny and merit re-reading.

If you can check the book out try the first page or two. If you find it funny or engrossing you probably won't be let down. If it makes no sense you might as well put the book down as it's not going to get any easier to deal with.

To the right minded reader this book is a treasure.

A tangy blend of sex, violence, and everything you should havelearned in Chem but they wouldn't teach you, My Cousin combinessubjects that were always afraid of each other in a way that makes just enough sense to keep you reading. By the middle of the book, you will be enough in tune with Leyner's message to laugh when Yogi Vithaldis's eye lands in the styrofoam coffee cup. In addition to its taboo subject matter, My Cousin covers the seemingly inconsequential with viscious detail, while easily skimming over anything that might become a plot. The dialog is indiffererent and cynical, indicative of the world where Leyner lives, where phone sex happens on the answering machine and a man is a man is an android. This book paints an exiciting and depressing picture of the future, a time when all the priorities will have changed. My advice to the reader: read twice, once to laugh and ask "why the hell..." and once to see "why" and to put it together. Lynne Plettenberg PS: Makes great quotes to throw off your friends in conversation.

'Tooth Imprints on A Corndog' is great. This one is an unreadable collection of rambling nonsense.

Leyner is more often than not a solid 4-star writer (My Cousin, Et Tu, Tetherballs), but his first book offers little pleasure beyond the fun of its title. A number of years passed between this debut and the much more worthwhile "My Cousin" and it was a healthy period of artistic growth, evidently. There are a few flashes of cleverness here and there, but this is overall a soggy and underdeveloped effort that makes you realize how delicate and precise his unique style is: in later works, it's a marvel of pop culture satire, rapid fire wit, and intriguing arcania. Here, it's a sophomoric dud that too often reads like really bad Barthelme. Or really bad Leyner.

Don't misunderstand: everything Leyner's done after this first collection is brilliant writing and mandatory reading. But ESTHER WILLIAMS is the most godawful hodgepodge of literary conceits and pratfalls you may ever be unlucky enough to read. Obviously, some episode of satori marked the time between this and his next book, the now-classic MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST. I'm being harsher than I should be, perhaps, considering how great a satirist Leyner has become. But even he probably wishes this book would crawl off his resume. Take a pass on ESTHER and go straight to his other four collections.