The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

This book is not for everyone and obviously doesn't try to be. (Simply reading a book with this title makes it likely that the reader will have to explain himself a number of times.) But it is funny, irreverent and, amidst the absurdity, touches upon issues such as the arbitrariness of mythology (and religion), the evolution of legend through the oral tradition, the inadvisability of engaging in carnal relations with gods, a comment on of the lack of specificity in horoscopes, a critique of importuning Gods in small matters, and the desire for a millennial end to modern life by a growing number of everyday people. Leyner even finds time to deliver an interesting defense of faith: "That the God's only occur in Ike's mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike's mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative."In the author's bizarre and satiric cosmogony, the Gods resemble the Greek or Roman pantheon with a more prosaic set of responsibilities. (Lady Rukia, for example, is the Goddess of Scrabble, Jellied Candies and Harness Racing.) These Gods established meaning for man during their Belle Epoque 14 billion years ago. They, fairly industrially, "put things in order, made them comprehensible, provided context, imposed coherence and meaning." Later, during their Diaspora, the Gods dispersed individually through the universe only to return in 1973 ultimately to take up residence in the top floors of the world's tallest building in Dubai.Unfortunately, as in Gaiman's American Gods, everyone except unemployed Jersey City butcher Ike Karton has forgotten these ancient dieties. Ike first becomes aware of them when he prays for a clue as to what to have for breakfast. This modest request is answered and Ike becomes the somewhat chosen one. This doesn't surprise him since he understands that "the Gods' designs are revealed not in incandescent flashes of lucidity, but in the din of the incomprehensible, in a cacophony of high-pitched voices and discordant jingles." Ike's goal in life is to be killed by the Massad to secure life insurance payments for his family and hopes his relationship with the celestial choir can help him achieve this selfless aim.And so it goes. Given the author's style, a plot summary may be more misleading than elucidating. In any case, Leyner's book is consistently humorous and thought-provoking though sometimes in a cringe-inducing manner. His irreverent approach reminds me of early Tom Robbins both in his use of interesting throwaway lines ("Isn't fate, like, the ultimate preexisting condition?") and in his ongoing obscure pop culture references to items such as the theme from F Troop, Popeye's laugh as a talisman, movies about Amy Fischer and the complexity of Dora the Explorer episodes. The book also invokes the cosmic irreverence of early Kurt Vonnegut (with a splash of Douglas Adams and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics).The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fun to read, iconoclastic and, except for the easily offended, pretty harmless. In fact, the text itself may have been tampered with by El Cucho, according to Leyner, (God of Head Trauma, Concussions, Dementia, Implanted Thoughts and Cultural Amnesia; El Cucho, not Leyner). So don't blame the listed author if you are offended.

The first thing we all must understand when we are writing or reading a review of Mark Leyner's The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (TSFN), is that TSFN incorporates everything pertaining to it into itself. This is to say that the very review that I am writing now is becoming a part of the epic as I am writing it. Even the thoughts going through your mind right now as you are reading this review (But what is TSFN about? Is it any good? Is it just a bunch of scatological silliness and repetition? etc... ) is being incorporated into TSFN and they will be an indispensible part of the canonical work from this moment forward.Secondly, we must consider the idea that Mark Leyner himself is both the hero Ike Karton and the antagonist XOXO (if XOXO really can be said to be the epic's antagonist). Leyner is clearly, "A man marked by fate. A man of the Gods, attuned to the Gods. A man anathematized by his neighbors. A man beloved by La Falina and Fast- Cooking Ali, a man whose mind is ineradicably inscribed by XOXO (TSFN, 33)." While simultaneously, Leyner is clearly a manifestation of XOXO, God of Dementia, Implanted Thoughts and Alcoholic Blackouts. Leyner has revealed TSFN to us in order to inscribe his inscrutable, maddening, ingenious imagination into each of our brains with a sharp periodontal tool while he plies our souls with drugged sherbet. I for one will never be the same, and the Mister Softee jingle will be looping over and over in my head for all eternity.Thirdly, it is very difficult to write a review of TSFN without using profanity that will cause Amazon to not post my review. The inane, scatological language that is almost inescapable in TSFN thanks to XOXO is deemed inappropriate by Amazon. Can Amazon's attempt to censor my review be their way of chanting Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike and preserve the integrity of the epic? Are Amazon themselves participating in the construction of TSFN in this way?Finally, there is no getting around the fact that TSFN, and Leyner's writing more generally, is not for everyone. It is insufficient to simply describe it as "bizarre" or "seizure inducing" or "legitimately demented" or "profound" or "ingenious." Leyner and TSFN defy such simplistic reductionism, and like XOXO, even meaning itself. Many people do not wish to feel as if the book that they are reading might actually drive them insane and they are welcome to their opinion; however, I have no problem saying that Mark Leyner is my favorite writer on planet earth and TSFN is his giggle fit inducing, brain-melting masterpiece.

Leyner's return to fiction excited me a great deal -- I'm a big fan of his earlier novels Et Tu, Babe and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Frosted isn't necessarily as jaunty a farrago as the other two novels, but it has its selling points. Leyner seems to be spoofing mythology, storytelling and Scripture in his endlessly self-referential, repetitive narrative about a bunch of annoying gods who control the life of one particularly annoying, muscular, anti-Semitic unemployed, wife-beater-wearing butcher in Jersey City, whose daughter may have had a love child with one of the gods. It's as if he saw a person matching the physical description of said butcher in Jersey City (Leyner lives in nearby Hoboken) on some Saturday afternoon and decided to turn him into a faux-heroic figure. The narrative, such as it is, marches in toward a predetermined finale that may or may not happen, depending on the arrival of the Mossad and some new gods. Of course, there's drugs (Gravy, favored of the gods and the butcher), and there's a bunch of blind, Homer-like bards who sing the entire story (including additions by a god who seems to like messing with people's minds and souls) while banging out rhythms on cans of orange soda. Like Hebrew Scripture and Homeric poetry, there's repetition, and like metafiction, the story continually turns in on itself. If it's a commentary on anything, it's a commentary on commentaries, on the impossibility of commenting on or analyzing literature, because once commented upon, the story changes and makes the commentaries completely irrelevant. Or something. I liked it.

"with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion"If that description of this book, taken from the text of the book itself, puts you off then it isn't for you. It is very much for me. It's funny and sad, epic and intimate and unlike any book I've ever read. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Leyner steps into the twenty-first century with his best novel yet. A kaleidoscopic anti-narrative that retells the epic story of unemployed butcher Ike Karton's dealings with the gods as that story is destroyed before the reader's eyes. Leyner spins a modern mythology of the kind that Neil Gaiman could if he ran towards rather than away from contemporary culture within a story structure of the kind that David Foster Wallace could have created if he hadn't had both eyes on academia. Grab yourself a jerrycan of orange soda and start chanting...

This book is worth reading just for its inventiveness. A dazzling stand-up routine in prose, there's nothing else like it. This is energetic and experimental writing, everything else you read after will seem to be in slow-mo.

Oops, Leyner has done it again. It's simply too much for this kiddie. You'll never listen to "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" by the Pet Shop Boys again without feeling like you've just lost your virginity. The master of everything good has returned to serve the planet another delicious martini. Et Tu, Amazon?