Not that Leyner, for all his originality and brio, is entirely sui generis. In his verbal verve, absurd glee, and non-Euclidean sense of fictive space, Leyner can be placed in a sort of counter-tradition dating back at least to the drunken monk Rabelais, flourishing in the 18th century with Sterne and Diderot, thumbing its nose at Victorian sobriety with Lewis Carroll, and resurfacing in the 20th century in such different guises as Alfred Jarry. Raymond Queneau, S.J. Perelman, and mass-media avatars like the Marx Brothers, classic cartoons, music video and advertising.

In keeping with his seeming self-appointment as a home-computer Homer singing Iliads of the Information Age, Leyner has peopled Tetherballs with cameos from the celebrated to the obscure; the ideal reader would need at least passing familiarity with Ralph Reed, Reese Witherspoon, Richard Speck, the Wu-Tang Clan, William T. Vollman, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Helena Bonham Carter, Morrissey, Stéphane Mallarmé, the Cirque de Soleil and Christine Todd Whitman, just to name a random few.

Before you scream, "We didn't start the fire!", be warned that the names he drops accrete like tiny jellyfish that, together, form a living, pulsing organism. It's hard to say how much of this will keep — within 15 years Tetherballs will probably need more footnotes than The Waste Land. But even if one doesn't catch all the names, the manic rush of images is sure to smooth over any rough passages. As teen Leyner writes in his fictive movie review, "although personally I found it easy to follow, it's so thoroughly larded with arcane jargon, biotech neologisms, and unexplicated acronyms as to be completely impenetrable to the average layperson."

The thing is that for all the apparent obstacles Leyner throws in the reader's path, Tetherballs is indeed fast-moving, imminently accessible, and one of the funniest books you are likely to read.