Rumors of Mark Leyner’s Disappearance Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

For acolytes of Mark Leyner, the 1990s were a time of abundance. No matter when new readers had joined the cult of Leyner—maybe it was after encountering My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist in 1990 or Et Tu, Babe in ’92 or Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog in ’95—the discovery of his fiction reliably sent such readers ecstatically scrambling both forward and backward in time: scouring his back catalog for earlier works while simultaneously scanning the horizon for the arrival of future installments. For a time, those installments appeared with satisfying regularity, every two or three years or so. With each new book, up to The Tetherballs of Bougainville , in 1997, Leyner expanded our understanding of that neologistic descriptor that had increasingly become the only satisfying way to describe his work: Leyneresque . And then: nothing. Nada. Silence. Leyner, in a sense, disappeared. If Leyner’s earlier novels were breakneck comic paeans sung to a supersize celebrity-engorged culture, these new novels felt…more fragile. More human. This disappearance was not as deliberate and calculated as, say, the disappearances of Salinger and Pynchon. It’s just that the novels… stopped. Leyner himself would occasionally poke his head up, as he did with the publication of his bestselling collections of medical curiosities, such as Why Do Men Have Nipples? , written in collaboration with Dr. Billy Goldberg. (And it must be said here that the phrase “as he did with the publication of his bestselling collections of medical curiosities, such as Why Do Men Have Nipples? , written in collaboration with Dr. Billy Goldberg” sounds itself like a line from a Leyner novel.) This gap between new novels, which would eventually stretch to fifteen years, is a time Leyner later called “the interregnum.” As mysteries go, his long absence from fiction writing was not, it turns out, that mysterious. Leyner had gone Hollywood. Which is to say: he’d sufficiently attracted the attention of powerful Hollywood types with overstuffed Hollywood wallets, in the grand tradition of great American novelists who are temporarily distracted and detoured from novels by the opportunities Hollywood affords. For Leyner, this […]

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