The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

I skimmed through the first chapter, thought it was over the top, and paid little attention. The second chapter is titled something like - Why do the Gods get the HOTS for humans? - which duly blew my mind. I re-read the first chapter, and was hopelessly hooked. I have no idea why I have fallen under the spell of this book and I don't care. I am not really reading it. I am immersing myself in it. I find some authors immpossible to read, e.g. Thomas Pynchon, but Mark Leyner is emminently readable. Thank you for the gift of this book Mr. Leyner. I have asked the Gods to make sure you get laid twice as much as the rest of us. Enjoy!

Well, I've made it to Chapter 6 / p. 55 without a - single - actual - thing happening. Not that there aren't a plethora of verbs. It's just those action words do not denote any um... actions. So, far I've been the victim of a listmaker. A rather boring listmaker, at that.This book is a list of a pantheon of deities and their inactivities for 4 chapters. Also, the 'story' is, much like the infinite images in 2 facing mirrors, uses specific oft repeated paragraphs. The thing leaves one desperate for a hook by now. A hook to keep the reader interested or amused. Buuut,... nope.The author has had 2 interesting enough arrangements of words for me to express internally 'Nice turn of phrase!'.Other than that, I'm done, and I have no idea which of my friends would like to be gifted this magnum opus.At p. 55 I am so bored and finally irritated by this author that I suppose this one may be actually dropped in the trash.*plonk*

Leyner's return to fiction excited me a great deal -- I'm a big fan of his earlier novels Et Tu, Babe and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Frosted isn't necessarily as jaunty a farrago as the other two novels, but it has its selling points. Leyner seems to be spoofing mythology, storytelling and Scripture in his endlessly self-referential, repetitive narrative about a bunch of annoying gods who control the life of one particularly annoying, muscular, anti-Semitic unemployed, wife-beater-wearing butcher in Jersey City, whose daughter may have had a love child with one of the gods. It's as if he saw a person matching the physical description of said butcher in Jersey City (Leyner lives in nearby Hoboken) on some Saturday afternoon and decided to turn him into a faux-heroic figure. The narrative, such as it is, marches in toward a predetermined finale that may or may not happen, depending on the arrival of the Mossad and some new gods. Of course, there's drugs (Gravy, favored of the gods and the butcher), and there's a bunch of blind, Homer-like bards who sing the entire story (including additions by a god who seems to like messing with people's minds and souls) while banging out rhythms on cans of orange soda. Like Hebrew Scripture and Homeric poetry, there's repetition, and like metafiction, the story continually turns in on itself. If it's a commentary on anything, it's a commentary on commentaries, on the impossibility of commenting on or analyzing literature, because once commented upon, the story changes and makes the commentaries completely irrelevant. Or something. I liked it.

For those familiar with Mark Leyner, no explanation needed. For newcomers, Leyner is a flat-out genius. His writing is turbo-charged hilarity and an astounding vocabulary. I've read every book he's written and all are fantastic. One suggestion, don't read Sugar Frosted first; it's too complicated in the Leyner style. Try "Et Tu, Babe" or "I Smell Esther Williams". Leyner is sort of like Faulkner in that some books are just too much for the uninitiated. Try his lighter fare first. But, read them all and be prepared to laugh and marvel.

This is one of the weirdest things I have read in the last few years. It has a bit of Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Duncan's Ink, Kress' 2nd book of her Beggar's cycle, Rose's HyperDeathBabies.com and a Squallor's Fugue song (I have no equivalent reference that would make sense for the Anglo-Saxon reader, sorry) while being none of those things.I read it on an intercontinental flight, and if it would not have been the only book I had with me I am honestly not sure I would have persisted in reading beyond the first few sessions.Some of the brilliance of the book is easy to access, it's in the ingenuous sentences construction or the pairing of the mundane with the erudite; but I suspect that for fully appreciating the author's work I would have needed far more intellectual horsepower. I could not remember all passages at the level of detail that would have been necessary to appreciate the differences introduced at every subsequent iteration. That would have required investing far more focus that I am willing to devote to one humorous novel.

I purchased this novel after a glowing New York Times book review and because the title is just that eye-catching. The NYTimes reviewer lauded Mark Leyner's narrative style as possibly heralding a new era of non-linear, less structured novels. I found it grating after a while.The premise is promising, starting off with the idea that the gods, similar to the ancient gods of Greece, are more often out for their own interests than the modern conception of a benevolent unitary God who looks out for the human race. These guys are a bunch of infighting, labidinous and amoral louts. So far so good. And the central figure of the novel is a seemingly innocuous human whose death (self-murder by Mossad or the FBI or someone) is foretold from the very beginning, and repeatedly brought up in the context of blind, chanting monks who have told his story over milennia, even before his birth. Also so far so good.But it gets old after a while. The repetition; the stringing together of obscure and more widely known cultural references; the foul language. I got bored and didn't care about half-way through the novel and skimmed the last quarter just to get to the end. This novel is a flash in the pan and I doubt it will have much salience for readers in a few years, let alone a decade or more from now (not that that is the only basis on which to judge a novel).

"with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology 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 repetition compulsion"If that description of this book, taken from the text of the book itself, puts you off then it isn't for you. It is very much for me. It's funny and sad, epic and intimate and unlike any book I've ever read. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Oops, Leyner has done it again. It's simply too much for this kiddie. You'll never listen to "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" by the Pet Shop Boys again without feeling like you've just lost your virginity. The master of everything good has returned to serve the planet another delicious martini. Et Tu, Amazon?

Leyner steps into the twenty-first century with his best novel yet. A kaleidoscopic anti-narrative that retells the epic story of unemployed butcher Ike Karton's dealings with the gods as that story is destroyed before the reader's eyes. Leyner spins a modern mythology of the kind that Neil Gaiman could if he ran towards rather than away from contemporary culture within a story structure of the kind that David Foster Wallace could have created if he hadn't had both eyes on academia. Grab yourself a jerrycan of orange soda and start chanting...

This book is worth reading just for its inventiveness. A dazzling stand-up routine in prose, there's nothing else like it. This is energetic and experimental writing, everything else you read after will seem to be in slow-mo.