The Tetherballs of Bougainville
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From his cult classic, I Smell Esther Williams, to his wildly popular and insightful column "Wild Kingdom" appearing in Esquire magazine every month, Mark Leyner has been giving us up close and personal encounters of the most hilarious kind for over a decade.
Now, in his new novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Leyner shares with us, long last, the quintessential coming of age story that every writer, at some point, is compelled to tell. In the novel we meet young Mark Leyner, 13-years-old to be exact, as he waits in a New Jersey prison to witness his father's execution. Adolescence is never easy, and it just so happens that this junior high schooler is on deadline to turn in a screenplay for which he has already been awarded the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. And, as it was for all of us during out teenage years, nothing seems to go as planned.
Written as autobiography, screenplay and movie review, The Tetherballs of Bougainville twists three familiar narrative forms into an outlandishly compelling story. Leyner's use of the media-driven formats brilliantly reflects our secret, shameful and hilarious desire to experience our private lives as mass entertainment. The Tetherballs of Bougainville skewers and celebrates American pop culture in the late twentieth century. Leyner's version of our lives is so deeply funny because it is so painfully true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Once again the superhero of his own Rabelaisian Chants of Maldoror, jaw-slackeningly inventive Esquire columnist Leyner (My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu Babe)--here a bare-chested 13-year-old in Versace leather jeans--has just won a $250,000-a-year-for-life prize for "best screenplay written by a student at Maplewood Junior High." That's the good news. The bad news is that he hasn't written the screenplay yet (he credits "a powerful agent")--and it's due tomorrow. Luckily, Leyner's dad is about to survive execution by lethal injection (years of PCP use and low gamma ray tolerance have built up his resistance to FDA-approved toxins), qualifying him for the innovative, Damoclean "New Jersey State Discretionary Execution" program, and the warden ("an absolutely stunning woman in a decollete evening gown") seems to be responding positively to young Leyner's sexual overtures. Clearly, there's a story in here somewhere, and Leyner milks it for all it's worth. Leyner the character's marketing skills prop up a brutal South Seas dictator ("It's Heart of Darkness, and Mark is Kurtz. But it's Kurtz as Maurice Saatchi"); Leyner pere and fils crank out a few dozen popular novels under such noms de plume as Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and A.M. Homes. By novel's end, the indefatigable idol of disaffected culture workers everywhere has given us a new TV show ("America's Funniest Violations of Psychiatrist/Patient Confidentiality"), an "achingly beautiful" three-hour cunnilingus scene and the rock 'n' roll apotheosis of crossover Bougainvillean tetherball star Offramp Tavanipupu. And these are just the highlights. Leyner is one of our most talented comic writers. In his "first 100% BONA FIDE NOVEL--story, characters, everything!" he is at his horny, hip, encyclopedic best.
