The Tetherballs of Bougainville
Mark Leyner’s fifth book is many things — a relentless yet loving pop-culture satire, a formal parody of various genres, a hot and infinitely dense sampling of exuberant, hypercaffeinated prose. Whatever else can be said, the book sure stands in a class by itself, blazing into virgin territory as the first tetherball novel ever.
As Leyner summarized it at a recent reading at San Francisco Booksmith, the plot is simple enough: Our swaggering, leather-trousered, tetherball-obsessed13-year-old protagonist, who conveniently bears the name of his author, witnesses the failed execution of his father, gets it on with the female warden, and reads her his review of an imaginary movie.
What makes this worth 240 pages are surprisingly traditional: structure and details. Leyner divided the story into the three most pervasive modes of writing today: the memoir, the screenplay, and the movie review. Leyner also fills in and filigrees the text with samples of such paraliterary modes as the video game, the advertising Q&A, signage copy (“Right lane must turn right”), art jargon, legalese, rock lyrics, etc.
Watching Leyner’s oeuvre evolve from the self-consciously “experimental” fragmentations of his first book, I Smell Esther Williams through the somewhat more linear narratives My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe (his first book to be dubbed a “novel”) to the relatively conservative prose of Wild Kingdom, his monthly column for Esquire, one might jump to the conclusion that Leyner was losing his edge, growing up and getting boring. Not at all. Though Tetherballs is the most continuous and coherent of all his books, Leyner’s newfound focus serves not to thwart his imaginary flights but to boost them higher, as water runs faster through a narrowed pipe. What infects much of his material with its truly outrageous hilarity is not how high his imagination soars, but the control he exercises — how, just at the right moment, he can slam on the brakes and spin to a stop with a fillip of utter banality.
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