T A B L E+T A L K Which sentences from literature do you wish you had written? Discuss your writer's envy in the Books section of Table Talk T O D A Y When boys were boys Allan Gurganus on New York's gay heyday By Dwight Garner (12/08/97) R E C E N T L Y Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) Caleb Carr By Dwight Garner (10/04/97) Arundhati Roy By Reena Jana (09/30/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Tribes of Palos Verdes By Joy Nicholson A tough-minded first novel, narrated by a misfit high school girl who finds solace in surfing the Southern California coast (12/08/97)		untethered ego MARK LEYNER TALKS ABOUT HOW HUMOR IS UNDERRATED, HOW NO ONE BELIEVES IN FICTION AND HOW HE (AND AN APE) ARE THE REAL AUTHORS OF "INFINITE JEST." BY LAURA MILLER | Even the most seasoned literary journalist might feel some trepidation when heading out to interview Mark Leyner for the first time. In his second novel, "Et Tu, Babe," he describes himself as "not your average author. I dress like an off-duty cop: leather blazer, silk turtleneck, tight sharply creased slacks, Italian loafers, pinky-ring. I drive a candy-apple red Jaguar with a loaded 9-mm semiautomatic pistol in the glove compartment." In "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist," his first book, he writes, "I am a terrible god" and claims that, since he took up bodybuilding, small birds die of terror and drop from the trees whenever he goes for a walk in the woods. This turns out to be an exaggeration. Leyner is a pleasant, articulate fellow whose good temper remained untarnished even at the end of a long publicity tour to promote his most recent book, "The Tetherballs of Bougainville." "Tetherballs," like all of Leyner's books, features its author as its main character -- or rather a version of "Mark Leyner" who's like an unchained, unholy amalgam of raging id and grandiose ego, drunk on pop culture and capable of mimicking its many degraded voices at will. As dazzlingly hilarious as Leyner's other books, "Tetherballs" is also the closest to, as Leyner puts it, "a bona fide novel." Its first part describes the failed execution of the fictional 13-year-old Leyner's father ("My father is not an evil person. He just can't do PCP socially"), who is then resentenced to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution: The state lets him go, but reserves the right to kill him at any moment. Unfazed, the adolescent Mark proceeds to seduce the glamorous female prison warden, despite the fact that he needs to write a screenplay overnight so that the next day he can accept the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award for best screenplay written by a student at Maplewood Junior High School (the prize being $250,000 a year for life). How did he win the award without actually submitting the screenplay first? "That's the advantage of having a powerful agent." The rest of "Tetherballs of Bougainville" consists of the screenplay itself, which simply records Mark's druggy tryst with the warden in her office. Of course, the screenplay includes the reading aloud of a long review/plot synopsis of the as-yet-unmade "Tetherballs of Bougainville" movie, which takes young Mark to the Solomon Islands where he sets up a PR agency for "dictators, warlords, corrupt corporations and criminal cartels from around the world" with his partner, Polo, a genetically altered Bonobo chimp with a secret identity. And that's the short version. "Tetherballs" is supposed to be more of a novel than your previous books, although it's still pretty unconventional. In fact I'm the one who said that, on something I wrote for some piece of marketing: a "bona fide novel." That was a bit of exuberance, but I'd call it a novel. It's the first book I've written with a continuous story, and with somewhat stable characters. To me that's a huge leap. Were you responding to something? "Et Tu, Babe" was your response to attaining a level of success. And then the next book, "Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog," had a number of pieces about being a father. There were reviews of "Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog" that said, "Well here we have Mark Leyner getting older. He's maturing and writing about his family and there's more of an emotional range to these pieces in this book." For some reason that really irritated me, so I decided to do a book that was inimical to that. I couldn't think of a creature more diametrically opposed to the good father than a 13-year-old boy. The 13-year-old Mark Leyner in this book has written a film review of the movie that's based on the screenplay in the book. The structure gets so complicated. He keeps this review in his pocket, as a talisman. This kid has never written a screenplay, never written anything except this movie review. The most wonderful thing that he can imagine is sitting in the morning, drinking coffee and reading a review of the movie he wrote. So he wrote the review instead of having to actually write the screenplay and get a movie made. But, if you think about it, the review, although it appears late in the book, was actually written before the execution. Yet it refers to Mark's scene with the warden, which he couldn't possible have known was going to happen when he wrote the review. There's a Chinese puzzle quality to this seemingly wild, goofy story. This book isn't just one damn thing after another. It has an interesting, elaborate construction. Writing one entertaining bit after another -- which is what I do -- I think that the danger is that people don't notice other things in the book. The one damn thing after another stuff is hugely funny, and comedy tends to drown out other aspects. Humor is very loud. Which is OK. I mean, I can't dictate to people how they should read the book. But this is the first time that I've done something in which the playfulness of the macrostructure is equal to the playfulness of the microstructure. That's why I like to say it's my first novel, because in a way, that's what a novel is: a book that's as interesting in its overarching structure as it is sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The experience of reading one damn thing after another is not sufficient to me anymore to give you, as a reader, but people sometimes don't notice the formal intricacies that I do. I don't mean that in a pompous way. I just can't think of a less pompous word. N E X T+P A G E +| Who really wrote "Infinite Jest"?