Leyner on Love

摘要

Reading Mark Leyner's fiction is like entering an elevator where every button is labeled in menacing gibberish.Here's a typical paragraph of self-referential Leyner deconstruction from his new book, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit: "We often have the eerie feeling, as we traverse the text, that the Chalazians themselves (among the most literate peoples on earth) are reading aloud along with us. Or, put another way, there's a mirroring reciprocity at play here: we're reading what the characters are reading and the characters are reading what we're reading."S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) was a writer whose arch command of erudite language much resembles Leyner's. But Perelman wrote real jokes, and was so funny that the Marx Brothers hired him. Leyner also works for Hollywood (he wrote the screenplay for the 2008 film War, Inc., among other things) and he is just as smart as Perelman, but normal jokes bore him and he much prefers to torment his readers by folding, spindling, and mutilating language and the very act of reading.Leyner, a writer's writer if ever there was one, can entertain writers with writer-jokes: "In late medieval chivalric romances, Chalazian Mafia Faction street soldiers were frequently portrayed as miniaturized mechanomorphic vermin, scurrying behind the toilets in the men's rooms of bars."This quip is chuckleworthy to us novelists because a sentence like this can never actually be "written." It's impossible for a human being to actually sit down and think and type that sentence. That sentence has to be architected through some postmodern method of splintering and splicing.