After the unrelenting bleakness of Matt Bell's apocalyptic, mutant-baby novella Cataclysm Baby and the hundreds of pages of rape and murder that comprise Part IV of Bolano's 2666, we're in serious need of something a bit lighter for August. And luckily we've found something with a title so preposterous half of you won't believe we're serious about reading it. But we're serious. Mark Leyner's The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is the August selection for PBR Book Club.
All we needed was the first paragraph of the recent New York Times Book Review of Nutsack to convince us that Leyner was a novelist our club needed to tackle:
"Mark Leyner writes in a genre that could be called Mark Leyner: gun-to-the-head comedy delivered with a stratospheric I.Q. Leyner’s fiction isn’t narrative so much as a thundering procession of twisted skits, pinging from brainiac literary theory to the latest disgraces of reality TV. Just when it seems that, line by line, there might be no smarter writer on the planet, Leyner indulges in gleefully juvenile sprees of lewdness, asserting the sublime pleasures of the absurd. He is either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent."
So what the hell is it about? We're not sure (but apparently something about a group of gods driving around in a van). We do know it it has a scene in which "Bosco makes Mi-Hyun 50 feet tall and pleasures her with the mummified body of King Tutankhamen and the cryonically preserved head of the baseball player Ted Williams."
So pick up your copy today and let's have some laughs with our PBR while also learning "how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left behind" and "that fiction can be robust, provocative and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment."
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