The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
How about this: fractal punk. I mean, if Steam-punk is a future based on Victorian industrial-age technology, and Rock-punk is a modern society with technology like the Flintstones, and Vampire the Masquerade can call itself Goth-punk, and Gibson gave us Cyber-punk, then why can’t we call the rendering of an aesthetic through the lens of a narrow paradigm “-punk”? Leyner’s writing is self-reflective, self-iterative. It’s the literary consequence of recursion. He can start with nothing and via hypnogogia achieve a hologram. Shatter a hologram and any one piece is the hologram. Zoom in on fractal and you’ll have a fractal. Decimal dimensions. Irrational in the mathematic sense and not the logical one.
I am not trying to write like him in this review, for what it’s worth. Hypnogogia, for example: you know how when you sort of doze off while reading, and your pre-dream brain starts throwing up a chaos of images? Do that while reading The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and you will not be able, upon snapping awake, to know which was the book and which was your own brain.
This is NOT stream-consciousness writing. This is not “merely” random. This is not chaos. This is not “merely” sensitivity to initial conditions. This is not “God in the Machine.” This is not even “God IS the machine.” This is just “God.” Or Gods.
Not religious Gods. Not exegesis Gods. Leyner starts with nothing, tosses in some random bits, and big-bangs into existence a story that folds in on itself. The book is a book about the book it is about. The writer is the God of a universe created by writing. And it is artistic and genius and, “Even those who consider this to be total bullshit have to concede that it’s upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.”
If you love Leyner, you will love The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. If you hate Leyner, I feel sorry for you. You’re the phlegm that Ike whispers to, out of which a God is created. Leyner is not post-modern, or modern, or anything. He’s Leyner.