Customer Reviews

Et Tu, Babe

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Mark Leyner should consider himself extremely fortunate. Few writers have been able to write completely self-indulgent anecdotal quasi-fiction which draws equally from their own lives and from the pop culture universe of celebrities and the media, swirl it all together in a dizzying and fragmented amalgam of anti-linear narrative vignettes and-here's where Leyner is unique, and damn lucky-actually sell books. I have no doubt there are plenty of writers out there who have done all of the above, with the possible exception of actually making a name for themselves in the commercial publishing world, as Leyner has.

Reading Et Tu, Babe, I was almost instantly reminded of two other writers: Richard Brautigan and, oddly enough, humor columnist Dave Barry. Indeed, Leyner's work often reads like a humorous essay, segmented into brief two- or three-page chapters and averaging about three or more punchlines per paragraph. Leyner has likened his readings to stand-up comedy and feels the skills and goals of his readings are the same as those of a stand-up performance. Perhaps even more notable than his frenetic storytelling style is his dissolution of whatever boundaries might exist between so-called fiction and his-or our-reality.

Leyner makes no effort to distinguish his autobiographical reality from the fictional surreality he creates in Et Tu, Babe. For Leyner, the motive behind appearing in his own story is the story itself: this is a book about celebrity and megalomania, and so Leyner really has no choice but to cast himself as the book's protagonist. He's not about to sit down with the reader and help him or her figure out where real life ends and fiction begins. In fact, he doesn't really seem to care where that boundary lies, if it exists at all. In one interview, Leyner says, "I've always been fascinated by ... the way the creation of public figures has hybridized fact and fiction. Or the way we promote idealized images of ourselves to acquaintances in our intimate life. The whole business of fact and fiction is never as clear as people make it. It's quite fuzzy."

By casting himself as a superhuman demigod in Et Tu, Babe, Leyner is exaggerating many of his actual traits, and adding quite a few extra ones. He is exploring his own fantasized identity, the idealized image of himself that he'd like to present to people every day. We all have idealized versions of ourselves we'd like to wow our friends with-but most of us don't get to write books about these versions. Leyner asks himself what he'd do if he were omnipotent. We ask ourselves this question too-although perhaps not as often in our adult lives as we did when we were younger. What would we do if we were above the law? What would we buy if money were no object? Which celebrities would we befriend? Which enemies would we eliminate?

When Leyner answers such questions, a tumult of chimeral hyperbolas blossom and crowd the 170 pages of Et Tu, Babe. But for all of the book's escapist fantasy, Leyner acknowledges that fiction doesn't always have to be quite so unbelievable, aggrandized, or fantastic as his novels might be. In fact-how do we even separate fact from fiction? The authenticity of "real-life" events-and their distinction from fiction-is often far more artificial than we'd like to think.

Leyner's style is often quick, fragmented, and extraordinarily heterogeneous. His writing is often compared to television and the short attention span to which it caters. Readers will probably be simultaneously annoyed and exhilarated by this rough and jumpy style Leyner has cultivated. He offers some enlightening reasons for developing such a style: "I think I really started coming up with these ideas when I was a sophomore or junior in college. When you'd read a long book like George Eliot's Middlemarch, for example, where if you're in a rush you can skip entire sections. If somebody visits a country home, there will be 25 pages describing the front lawn that the reader has to cross to get to the front door. If there's a test the next day, by all means get to the door. ... I didn't want to write books that include transitional passages which merely serve to move characters from room to room. I want every sentence to be unskippable, very intense and charged."

To hear Leyner explain it, this style does seem more legitimate than simply writing fiction that reads like television views. But his writing is nothing if not entertaining, and I feel he deserves more credit than simply being considered the creator of literary MTV. For a (slightly) more cohesive plot, try Leyner's The Tetherballs Of Bougainville, which in my opinion is even funnier than Et Tu, Babe.

"Can I help you?"
"Yes," she said. "There's a new album out, I'm not sure what the name of it is... but it's the sound of two men lifting tremendous weights. I wish I could remember the name of it... oh, I was just talking to someone about it." --from "Et Tu, Babe"

If you were insulted by this paragraph, Mark Leyner isn't for you. If you sat there going, "what is going on here?"... Mark Leyner isn't for you.

If you wondered whether the weights are Nautilus or barbell, Mark Leyner is for you. The premise of the book is essentially that Mark Leyner has gone completely insane after the sales of his last, resoundingly popular volume. He's assembled a crack marketing team (1-900-T-Leyner) to promote his heavily-armed book tours. He practices self surgery. He has a book of nude photographs of himself, taken with a defense spy sattelite. And he gets a tatoo in radioactive ink on his internal organs to impress xray technicians. If it is to be said that this book has a plot, the plot is this: Mark Leyner is avoiding the FBI after stealing a vial of Abraham Lincoln's morning breath.

You now know all you need to buy this book. In fact, you probably already know whether it'll be dog-eared and read fanatically to your friends (mine is) or put it on the 'eventually pile.

(c) 1996 Danyel Fishe

I first came across Mark Leyner by way of his most recent composition, The Tetherballs of Bougainville. Having devoured it faster than any book I have ever read I craved more. I picked up Et Tu, Babe and had high expectations. Expectations that were mostly rewarded but where Tetherballs flys this one just drives really fast. I found myself getting a little bored with Et Tu in parts. It was relentlessly manic in a way that made it become tiring in parts. Don't get me wrong, this was a very funny book, it's just that while Tetherballs repeatedly extracted convulsive fits somewhere beyond laughter out of my body, Et Tu only made me laugh out loud. I recommend reading this one before Tetherballs for this reason. I plan to read My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist next. (By the way, while it is not very similar in style or content the last most hilarious book I read was Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I highly recommend it for those with a taste for the eccentric and a love of dark humour a la Leyner or Hunter S. Thompson)

Okay, so one day I was mulling over the question "If you were trapped on a desert island and could have only one movie, one album and one book, what would they be?" Without much thought I declared, "Movie: 'Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.' Album 'The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to The Ketchup and Mustard Man' by the Billy Nayer Show. Book: 'Et Tu Babe' by Mark Leyner. Then I'd spend the rest of my life chuckling maniacally and eating coconuts." It took me about 8 years to find this book. Sometime back in my adolescence, I ran across the "Visceral tattooing" portion of "Et Tu Babe" excerpted in "Harpers." Thinking it was pretty funny, I clipped it out and thought I should buy the book. Being the spacy teen that I was, I lost the clipping and promptly forgot the name of the book and the author. Fast forward eight years and someone sends me Leyner's "Tooth Imprints on a Corndog." My immediate reaction was to jump up onto my sofa and shout "This is the guy! THE GUY!!!" I promptly bought everything he ever wrote. Words cannot express the love. After the first time I read "Et Tu Babe," I couldn't stop going back and rereading portions of it. I was pulling it back off my shelf every day. People would call me on the phone and I'd say "Wait a sec...let me read you something." and then I'd become unintelligable with laughter attempting to read them some excerpt. Finally I lent my copy to a friend and found myself lost--tortured!--without it. So I bought another copy. I lent that one out. Then I bought another copy... I now have a STACK of copies of "Et Tu Babe" so that I can do my part to "seed the world with Team Leyner thought." Sure, Leyners verbose, tangential absurdism is not for everyone (all you Chris Moore fans can just run back home to Mommy, alright?) but if you want GENUINELY laugh-out-loud comedy that doesn't pull any punches, run (don't walk!) and buy this book.

I was fourteen. I went to the library to do research for a biology paper. I noticed an discarded copy of this book on sale for 25 cents. Since I liked the cover, I bought it. Well, I ended up with an F on the paper, but the book ended up being quite influential. Thanks to Mark Leyner I slowly lost my mind and had to find it, bit by bit, and reassemble it like some patchwork quilt. Everyone's teenage years should be so fruitful...

Mark Leyner's prose is thick with humour, or at least with *attempts* at humour. He seems to write as if every sentence had to be the punchline and keystone sentence of the entire chapter.

The attempts are nearly always successful, and the supercharged style is seriously addictive. Know what you're getting into, though: this is not a book that lets your mind sit back and relax. There is no human drama, nor any emotional complexity. There is SO much happening in every sentence, and Leyner demands your humour-sense's undivided attention. Bed-time reading it's not.

"Et Tu, Babe" is, in essence, a sequel to a book (Leyner's brilliantly bizarre "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist") which wasn't actually a coherant novel. Critics embraced the former, but what was Leyner going to do for an encore.... Whoo boy.

What he did was write a 1000 mph masterpiece about a megalomaniac author named Mark Leyner who wrote a masterpiece called "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", steals Lincoln's Morning Breath, performs his own internal organ surgeries, gets a set of bodygaurds who fulfill his every paranoic whim, and is sentenced to having one item permanently removed from his household every month by the FBI. Of course, there's more, but no review could possibly get to it. A little more accessible than "Gastroenterologist", but no less insane. Hysterically perfect.

A novel written while needing to pee very badly.

Wacky, fast-paced, very short.

Like a squash ball bounced of his oiled pectorals, Leyner's novel of narcissism and nudity carooms around the inside of your skull, leaving little untouched.

Pick it up on a flight to Los Angeles, and look at the beautiful people in a whole new way.

Who is this "Mark Leyner", why is he here, who brought him here, when and WHY? These are all questions attempting pathetically to be answered in this book. Luckily, that ends after the blank first page and segues into the total frontal lobotomy that is "Et Tu Babe". Comfortably resting somewhere on the borderline of complete incoherence and an organized encyclopedia of pop colture jokes, "Et Tu Babe" is bibliophied decay, masked as offbeat humor. The beginning paragraph will typefy the whole novel for you, and, if you're at all like me you'll just shrug and say "exactly...where the hell did he get that...anyway?" you'll read on an cease to care. An altogether ingenius book.....a must read.....go buy it...now! Or face the wrath of the little freakish kiddies performing plastic surgery on a peekid girl behind the canned goods section.

Mark Leyner is a strange, strange man. Weird and outrageously funny, this narcissistic pseudo-autobiography made me laugh so hard I thought I'd choke. You'll either love it or hate it.