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sievesister · 10 years ago

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BOOK REVIEW: Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner

[Originally written December 16, 2013 as a final essay/response to Et tu, Babe for William Donoghue's LI 304: Fictions of Effect at Emerson College. This hasn't been edited since then, but I figured it'd be a neat thing to post. It also makes absolutely no sense if you haven't read this book but if you have, it's a parody of the ridiculously stylized and self important way Leyner writes.]

Danielle Behrendt Interviews Mark Leyner

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected that the most intense, and in a certain sense, most significant, interview of my nascent career would be easy, but I did not expect that it would require my literal descent into Hell either. Remembering that Bill needed my interview in his inbox by December 16, I contact Joe Casale at headquarters the night before and he arranges for me to meet Mark Leyner for brunch in Hell, a favorite ironic hide out of his since his so-called disappearance. By the time we hang up, Baby Lago has already emailed me my boarding pass for a flight to Vegas—leaving in an hour—, a coupon for 10% off Team Leyner apparel if purchased through their smartphone app in the next seventy-two seconds (with the suggestion that I put it toward a new $40,000 t-shirt with diamonds studded in the shape of Leyner’s infamous torso), and specific directions to Hell. If this initial exchange is anything to go on, by the end of the interview my eyes will probably roll all the way out of my head.

Getting to Hell is a pain in the ass. Once you get to McCarran, you have to take a cab to the unfinished Planet Hollywood/Westgate tower, the tallest building on the Vegas strip. Construction stopped on the building when David Siegel, who founded the enormously successful Westgate Resorts timeshare company, lost it all in the 2008 recession. Determined to finish the tower, as well as his opulent Florida replica of Versailles, he refused to negotiate with anyone who would have given him money to help him out, driving his company and family into the red. When Siegel’s funds stopped flowing, the Westgate half of the sign was turned off, and now still clings to the side of the building with the same desperate and useless tenacity with which an aging Hollywood star holds on to her old headshots and new botox needles.

Naturally, Siegel is the gatekeeper to Hell, which is obviously located just below Vegas. In order to be allowed in, you have to scale the Westgate/Planet Hollywood tower, sidestepping tarp and scaffolding, and climb on top of the extinguished sign. Once there, bird shit sticking to your shoes and the dust of the crushed careers of thousands of Westgate employees stinging your eyes, you must sit through a two and a half hour timeshare presentation given by Siegel himself, even though you and he both know that he is no more capable of selling you the vacations he offers than you are of buying them.

I only half listen to Siegel as he offers me prime loft apartments in the Lazarus Pit, Baghdad, and Serbia and scintillating waterfront on the Gaza Strip, southeastern Louisiana, the northwest coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and Fukushima, Japan. The meeting is excruciating, as I suppose it’s meant to be, and by the time I’m in the elevator going down, down down, I’m daze of white guilt and middle class resentment.

When I show up Leyner is exactly as I expect him. He luxuriates across a recalled plastic lawn chair next to a pool of flaming oil from the 2010 BP spill in a surprisingly effeminate way. His muscles ripple with two liters of extra dark tanning oil and in his formidable fist sweats a glass shaped like Perez Hilton’s head, filled to the brim with a Pepto-Bismol pink concoction that smells at first like lilacs and then, immediately, like trash.

“Babe,” he smiles as I sidle up, new grill glittering in the light of the flames. I have to step over pop photographer/rapist Terry Richardson, who’s crawling around the floor with a ball gag in his mouth and snapping pictures of every move Leyner makes, to sit in the small wicker chair beside his, which of course pokes me uncomfortably as I attempt to settle in.

I try not to ask about the grill—there are so many other things I want to learn in the limited time we have—which appears to be made of shattered crossing guard reflector plastic, Ring-Pop sugar shards, solid gold, tinfoil, and craft store rhinestones held together with corn syrup, spirit gum, and hot glue. Another reason I don’t ask about it is I’m sure he wants me to. With men like Leyner, one can never know how far a little attention can go. Instead, I say, “what’s in the drink?”

He sticks out his tongue and peels the ingredients off, waving each in the air dramatically for me to examine: ADJECTIVES, UNCTUOUS APLOMB, DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR, CONFIDENCE, DADDY PROBLEMS, FREE RADICAL SYMBOLS, INCOHERENCE, CONTROVERSY, SEX!, IMAGES, PRETENSION, “AMERICA.” He explains that the drink—a quarter as strong as Lincoln’s morning breath but half as pungent as Princess Diana’s bottled tears—is garnished with real plexiglass that has been crushed beneath the heels of the model from the album art of The Ohio Players’ 1975 ‘Honey’. Kind of like how it’s said the that little flecks of metal in Goldschlager nick drinkers’ throats in order to intoxicate them more quickly, the plexiglass pierces his esophagus to facilitate maximum absorption of the cockiness, the vapidness, and the meaningless high contrast high volume selling technicolor nonlinear tongue in cheek put-on nothingness contained in the cocktail. Leyner clears his throat, and I hear it all settling and clinking together behind his tongue, like Lindsay Lohan rummaging through her purse next to a slot machine.

“Spectacular,” I tell him, adding, without thinking to filter myself, “you must swallow a lot of bullshit.”

He grins, tongue bleeding as he licks pink foam off of the grills, “of course. I mean, I expect my fans to.”

We nod together and Terry Richardson’s documents the whole thing from the exact angles that best compliment Leyner’s colossal trapezius and deltoid muscles, which, like his teeth, glint in the light of the tragic Gulf fire.

“It was my birthday last week,” he says, slurping up the last of the drink. “I got the new Kindle.”

“Yeah? What’s that like?”

“It’s a book. Brand new model, very exclusive. They weren’t even on sale for the Black Friday Massacre.”

“Were you at the massacre this year?” I ask, thankful for the segue. “I know after your fashion statement in 2008 the world has held its breath for your appearances.”

Of course he says he was, in his box seat in the Rupert Murdoch blimp as usual, hovering above the bullet-riddled Mall of America. After the enormous success of The Hunger Games and Suzanne Collins’ (another barely competent author) subsequent election to the position of Minister of Dystopic/Plot-driven Population Control, every year the government picks an American shopping outlet at random and decimates all who are waiting in line outside. Sedated by poshlust and tryptophan, the sheeple never see it coming. From his seat Leyner watched Pepsico’s and Coca-Cola’s Rolls Royce Robots roll in to mow down holiday shoppers, welfare ToyStamps and Liposuction gift cards clutched in their sweating, trampled fists. The Nestle Space Station even lowered itself close enough into the atmosphere—which in Leyner’s version is yellow and pink, of course—to rain DDT and sulfur mustards onto the unsuspecting crowd.

“What else did you get for your birthday?” I ask.

“A subscription to the Anti-Social Network.”

“Anti? Is that a new Facebook extension or something?”

“Quite the opposite. This was created by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg for the rights to the Facebook idea in the first place. They’ve been trying to come up with a comparable product ever since. Well. It’s not so much a product, really, as it is a procedure.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means,” Leyner stares into his glass sadly, granules of pink sugar and poly methyl methacrylate swirling around its bottom, “that I can no longer taste.”

“Excuse me?”

“I no longer have the ability to taste. Anti-Social Network. Use your modern northeastern liberal arts education, babe. What is a social network?”

I’m sure he’s trying to trick me, so I give him every answer I have.

“A social network is any electronic medium in which you design an avatar, a hyperbolic version of yourself, to interact with other avatars in the event of your physical absence at a time during which another ‘human’ wants to judge, market to, or research you for their own business ventures based on superficial credentials you most likely fabricated in hopes of gaining their favor/subscription to whatever it is that you, in turn, are trying to sell.

“The most popular, like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera, often help one extend their senses (particularly that of sight) to places where they cannot physically be in order to vicariously experience vacation videos or pictures of food or newborn babies or the club. In short, social networks allow everyone to experience the intense scrutiny under which twenty-first century celebrities attempt to eek out a normal human life.”

“Exactly. And who wants that, really? Everybody’s famous these days. Everyone gets their fifteen nanoseconds, their million pageviews, their collagen and cotton candy and headshots and photoshop. It gets so loud out there in Cyberspace, you can barely hear yourself! That’s why the Winklevi created the Anti-Social Network. You cut off a sense, you mollify some of the onslaught on your nerves.”

“Interesting.”

“Very. I hear Kanye West’s going for the full Helen Keller. I thought I’d get rid of taste first. You can’t even imagine how it’s revolutionized the bedroom.”

“I’m surprised, Mr. Leyner. You’re known worldwide as a man with, if you’ll excuse the pun, quite decadent tastes, in everything from Dansuke Watermelon, Casu Marzu, and Surstromming to civet coffee, Pulque, and Baby Mouse Wine.”

“I’m also known world wide as,”—I suck in my breath before he continues, straining to keep my facial expression neutral—“the most intense and significant writer of all generations that intersect with my life time. Which,” he winks at me, and I worry that I noticeably wince, “I can assure you is far from over. My fans rely on me to be a martyr and a trail blazer. A livestream of my first procedure, performed in the atrium of my summer villa near the opening of Mount Vesuvius, was broadcast on the Jumbotrons of most professional stadiums in the country, all of which were sold out. Desiree worried that if we merely put the video online, the web-traffic it would attract would slow down the entire world-wide web. I’m known as an advocate for the common human/internet-user, too.”

Another perfect transition. “It’s interesting that you bring that up. Are you familiar with the music of Dethklok?”

“Why do you ask?”

“In case you aren’t, Dethklok is a real death metal band based on a fictional death metal band from a show on Adult Swim created by comedian Brendon Small. One of the running jokes in the show is that, due to its extremely exaggerated universal appeal, Dethklok is the world’s seventh largest economy. Reading your book Et Tu Babe, I found that your headquarters and legions of fans reminded me of Dethklok more than a little bit.”

“Interesting. Perhaps I’ll invite Small to one of my writer’s workshops.”

We chuckle, which is good. From here on out the questions will only get more difficult, and at any moment I worry one of Leyner’s cronies will appear to drag me off to a “workshop�� as well.

“Perhaps. I’d also like to call your attention to page thirteen of the book, in which you describe being sent to your uncle’s Jew-devouring farm. Do you know which page I’m talking about?”

“I do.”

“Excellent. Okay. So. On this page, after you kill the anti-semitic agrarian with a 12-gauge shotgun, bury him in the cyclone cellar, steal his pickup truck, have your first sexual experience at the diesel-run electric turbine plant, and light a cigarette, you say you saw God in the sky.”

“Yes?”

“Have you read Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters or heard Bo Burnham’s song ‘Rant’?” Leyner sneaks a glance around the pool deck, disguising it as a dramatic cracking of his back. “No? Well, the quote from your novel is this: ‘there was God, wearing a pink polo shirt, khaki pants, and brown Top-Siders with no socks, his blond hair blowing in the powerful wind of charged particles and intense ultraviolet radiation from the galactic center. I hated him. And he hated me.’”

At the recitation, Leyner’s smile returns. I continue:

“Though I admit the Burnham comparison may be considered a stretch, the Palahniuk parallel absolutely rings true. In Invisible Monsters alone he says ‘all God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring,’ ‘parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something,’ ‘you have to accept that God might not like you,’ et cetera. These sentiments are similar, no?”

“Many artists ruminate on the existence of God and their relationship with Him,” Leyner defends himself. “I personally haven’t received any flack from His agent,” a gossamer film of blood and saliva shimmers across the grill as he attempts to win back my favor.

“Yes, but Palahniuk intentionally reuses details in his novels, repeating the same sentences and/or rephrasing them, in order to cleverly satirize and criticize popular culture and the political climate of our country. For example, the parents to which God is compared in Invisible Monsters are distant and fickle, initially railing against their son’s homosexuality only to, once they hear he has been killed by AIDS, rally behind the LGBTQ cause. When a 12-gauge shotgun is mentioned in that book, it is being used by its main character to shoot off her own jaw because, as a model, she is tired of being looked at and analyzed all the time. She wants to be more than her appearance, so she destroys it. Her brother doesn’t really die of AIDS, it’s just easier to tell his parents that than the fact that he plans to have sexual reassignment surgery; in either case, their son would be dead. Is there a reason you depicted God as a stereotypical frat boy? What does that symbolize?”

Unsurprisingly, Leyner refuses to explain his symbol in any way shape or form. The thin line that his mouth has become, even with the bulky grills poking out from behind it, implies that he is no longer listening. This interview has already gone on pages longer than I had initially anticipated so I decide to ask a few more telling questions before getting back on the elevator to Westgate.

“Moving on. The paragraph that begins after your description of God says ‘I have spent the majority of the 36 years in orphanages, reformatories, prisons, and mental institutions.’ While I don’t doubt this, it also seems to be a direct quote from the documentary Carl Panzram: The Spirit of Hatred and Vengeance. I must admit this documentary was released after your book, but it is based on the personal statements of a man who lived from 1891-1930.

“On page fourteen, you describe how, as a child, your ‘incisors grew four to five inches a year.’ Have you read or seen Tim Burton’s adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish? No? Well, in it Edward Bloom’s limbs grow uncontrollably as a child, causing him to realize he was destined for bigger things than his town allowed. You also mention you were ‘treated for a slew of psychiatric and behavioral problems,’ including many of the disorders mentioned in the documentary The Medicated Child, yet, unlike someone like Palahniuk would have, you do not explain this or any of the other outlandish metaphors you include in Et Tu, Babe. For example, later on that same page you mention President Hallux Valgus, essentially describing him as the first world leader to biologically adapt to pollution, or to be full of trash, or to not be able to take in or put out aspects of the normal human experience. The way you word this fictitious bio is reminiscent of those of many other historical figures, and yet the reason for its inclusion and peculiarities are not returned to again.

“There is no metaphorical reason I can deduce, based on the additional evidence you offer readers, why ‘Bernard Hermann’s shrieking score for the shower murder scene in Psycho’ would be designated as the national anthem. I will however give you the ‘post-coital’ look comment, though I doubt you intended the meaning I’m taking away from it. What is the significance of ‘a psychic Italian-American woman who recently had cosmetic breast-and-buttock-augmentation surgery’ having been the Vatican? Why is everything pink and yellow? How does that make you a visionary warrior? What’s with all the pimples and the scarring and the armpits? You include the word ‘babe’ twenty-four times by page ninety-four—said by you every time except the twelfth, when Arleen uses the word in reference to a phone call from Francine Masiello/Desiree Buttcake, which brings me to another point, Buttcake? Are you serious?—at which point I stopped counting because I realized there wasn’t any conceivable reason why you were doing that, either.

You’re cheap, Mark. This is ridiculous. You’re a succubus attempting to seduce Palahniuk’s least critical fans. You’re a lecherous Hunter S. Thompson wannabe. Oliver Stone’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ is 118 minutes long with almost 3,000 cuts and I doubt he’d be able to make sense of the incoherent, incongruous babbling that constitutes this ‘book’. The entirety of page eighteen reads like a plot summary for EDM forerunner Avicii’s music video for ‘I Could Be the One.’ No one thinks any of the ideas explored in that video—in which a heavyset woman with a boring office job fantasizes about a vacation full of delicious food and men, only to be run over by an eighteen wheeler once she finally works up the courage to book the trip—are fresh either but at least it’s fucking entertaining! On page 109 of Et Tu, Brute you ask ‘what would you think if I told you that I conceived of that entire scenario—word for word—in about two minutes between sets of incline bench presses?’ What would I think?! I’d be shocked, and as an aspiring novelist myself personally offended, if you came up with that outrageous word vomit any other way! Every idea you mention in this entire disaster is old, overdone, flat, meaningless. Your book appears to take place in the same universe as Lady Gaga’s music videos and the My Chemical Romance videos from the ‘Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys’ album but without any of the notable societal commentary included in any of those things. None of this is NEW, Mark. What do you think you’re doing?!”

“They say there are no new stories, Ms. Behrendt.” He is visibly shaken. I’m shocked I still haven’t been taken away. “Who am I to object?” (Humility? From him?)

“Yeah? Well I think that’s a lazy way to look at things. And, even if it were true, wouldn’t it then be each writer’s charge to search for ways to make old stories feel new, at least, especially writers who are lauded as clever, funny satirists for no reasons I can surmise? All the examples I just pointed out—and, again, if I had room for more, I would keep going—prove that you haven’t even tried to break new ground. The only remotely interesting parts of this book are page sixty-seven, with the president and the hair and nail clippings, and the excerpt from the anthropological textbook on page thirty-two. William Carlos Williams is my favorite poet, Mark. Have you ever read his short story ‘The Use of Force’? It’s the kind of visceral doctor’s office tale that would make you soil your silk boxers. You haven’t done anything with this book, not made me reanalyze the way I think or others do or draw new connections I hadn’t before or even entertain me. All you did was give me one more reason to consider myself a complete and total failure if people like you and Stephenie Meyer and the aforementioned Suzanne Collins and whoever wrote the Captain Underpants franchise manage to get your work published and I ultimately don’t. I’ve pored over this book for weeks and I have yet to find one reason to support your intensity or significance at all, or anything worth writing an academic paper about. Goodbye, Mr. Leyner.”

And with that I took my leave, Terry Richardson yipping at my heels and Leyner’s associates no doubt waiting at the top of the Westgate/Planet Hollywood tower to push me off of it one I returned.

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