In an era when stranger-than-fiction characters like professional house-guest Brian "Kato" Kaelin and criminal-turned-criminal-defense-attorney Colin Ferguson clutter the national consciousness, the satirist has an enormous burden: How do you spoof a world that has become a parody of itself?
In Corn Dog, Leyner, whose oeuvre includes Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, confirms that he is the American writer best suited for this daunting comedic task. Throughout his first collection of essays (reprinted from publications including Esquire and The New Republic), Leyner the writer fashions himself into Leyner the loonier-than-life persona.
He seizes upon popular obsessions as disparate as bodybuilding, parenthood, fear of government conspiracies and the mania for designer goods and weaves them into howlingly absurd scenarios that he depicts as if they were perfectly ordinary. In "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown," Leyner haggles with a department store saleswoman over a $3,450 Giorgio Armani silk backpack embroidered with "ethnic beading" for his 2-year-old daughter's Haute Barbie doll. "Oh, Brother" finds him playing investigative journalist for the trial of the Zeichner twins (obviously based on the Menendez brothers), who say they murdered their rich, generous parents because they perceived Mom and Dad's gentle and empathic behavior as "bizarre, frightening and, ultimately, a grave threat." Leyner as a marketing wizard ("Eat at Cosmo's") offers a scheme for product placement in classic literature, so that Shakespeare's "a gap in nature" becomes "The Gap in nature."
Describing it as over-the-top doesn't begin to capture Leyner's style, an imaginatively explosive fusion of $10 words (always used precisely), slang, consumerist slogans and obscure medical terminology suggesting that Leyner (a former medical copywriter) considers our body of culture a little diseased. And yet, his own effusiveness becomes a weird celebration of the very things he ridicules. The America that gave us Hulk Hogan and Zsa Zsa Gabor produced Mark Leyner too. (Harmony, $19)
by Sidney Lumet
Pacino, Hoffman, Hepburn, Fonda—Sidney Lumet has directed some of the biggest names in the business and helmed such passionate classics as Twelve Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon. So why is his book on filmmaking dry and mechanical? Lumet answers that question when he warns that "there are no personal revelations other than feelings arising from the work itself" and says of his colorful coworkers, "I respect their foibles and idiosyncrasies, as I'm sure they respect mine."
Too bad, since Lumet's line of work surely involves more than technical know-how and narrative instinct. Hasn't he had to corral runaway egos? Douse creative fireworks? Soothe giant talents clashing over great material? It turns out that Lumet is too much of a gentleman to intrude on the privacy of his actors, much less mine their "idiosyncrasies" for insight into his craft. Lumet recalls how a troubled Marlon Brando stumbled over the same line of dialogue dozens of times on the set of The Fugitive Kind (1959); but, by holding back his insider's take on Brando's well-known volatility, he comes across as a detached observer, not a savvy director. The range of Lumet's remarkable work gives even mundane details weieht. and his story telling skills are evident in this swiftly paced book. Still, you wish he had spent more time on the gifted actors and writers he has worked with and less on the types of lenses he prefers. Maybe reticence is what makes Lumet such an enduring, versatile director, but it's unfortunate that a large swath of his professional experience and indeed of his own fascinating personal life—his ex-wives include Gloria Vanderbilt and Lena Home's daughter Gail—has been omitted here. (Knonf. $23)
by Jane Smiley
Who'd have imagined that the author of the heartbreaking The Age of Grief and the grandiose, sometimes heartbreaking Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres was capable of such a fast, hilarious and, come to think of it, heartbreaking, novel? The title refers to a fictional midwestern university with a strong program in agrarian sciences, a severe budgetary crisis and a vice president who unfailingly refers to the students as "our customers."
Juggling myriad story lines, Smiley chronicles the life and career of, among others, the head of the horticulture department, Chairman X, whose distress over the fall of communism is matched by his hatred for Lionel Gift, preening professor of economics. Tim Monahan, a novelist and associate professor of creative writing, furnishes Smiley with ample opportunity to take deadly aim at writers' conferences and the New York literary establishment.
Moo U is a place of gently sloping terrain, well-tended flower beds and many secrets. A local farmer has quietly invented a machine designed to revolutionize agriculture, a professor obsessed with pigs is secretly conducting an experiment on a hog named Earl Butz, and a freshman from Iowa is desperate to hide the fact that she was last year's Warren County Pork Queen.
Not for a minute does Moo lose its perfect satiric pitch or its pacing. Not for a minute does it challenge Henry Kissinger's observation that university politics are especially vicious because there's so little at stake. Don't skip a page, don't skip a paragraph. It's going to be on the final. (Knopf, $24)
>Mark Leyner
THE JOY OF DELIBERATELY GETTING LOST
MARK LEYNER, 39, LIVES WITH HIS WIFE, Mercedes, and daughter Gaby, 21 months, in Hoboken, N.J., where he enjoys a custard doughnut with his black coffee and produces his maniacally imaginative prose with the fastidious zeal of "some mad jeweler agonizing over the most minute facet of every sentence."
How do you account for the bizarre juxtapositions and references in your work?
I am interested in everything sort of equally. I was one of those kids who would wake up really early and pick a volume of the encyclopedia and read it like a novel. When I ate cereal, I read everything on the box. My idea of heaven is a doctor's waiting room: a place to sit and read completely miscellaneous sorts of magazines as quickly as possible before you're handed the little cup.
What are you reading right now?
A guide to hair coloring, a book on capital punishment—my next novel opens with my father being executed by lethal injection—a biography of Sonic Youth and copies of Corrections Today, Gastroenterology and Packaging World.
Do you subscribe to these things?
Friends send me stuff. One thing people like about my work is the surprise of it, that your expectations are confounded at every turn. To give the reader that experience, I have to have a similar experience writing. So I try not to get habituated to any one kind of reading. There are cars now that have computerized maps, so it's harder to get lost. But getting lost is a great thing about traveling. One of the joys of life is being shocked and amazed, as Jessica Hahn used to say when she plugged her "intimate conversation" 900 number.
- Contributors:
- Nancy Jo Sales,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Eric Levin.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
