Gods must be crazy

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

By Mark Leyner

247 pages

Available at National Book Store

Nobody knew that writer Mark Leyner was lying in wait all these years like a festering literary sore, slouching towards Bethlehem. Nobody would have suspected that he was getting ready to pounce all over again.

With The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (excuse the title), the literary equivalent of a doped Lance Armstrong is back in the saddle: he’s still exploding words on the page with a take-no-prisoners brio.

He’s been busy all these years, of course, writing those wacky Q&A books about male matters (Why Do Men Have Nipples? is the one that springs to mind), a movie satire about the war industry with John Cusack (War, Inc.) and a few other scattered novels since his first novel, Et Tu, Babe, hit the bestseller lists in the mid-‘90s.

But The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is a novel that takes us deeply back into Mark’s world, as strange and ADHD as it is. He still writes prose that makes wimps run for cover. And his synapses still fire as no man’s have fired before.

The opening fills us in on how the world began. It’s Leyner’s Book of Genesis — or rather a demented mix of Genesis, The Nature Channel, Bullfinch’s Mythology, and a whole lot of other unrelated stuff.

There was never nothing. But before the debut of the Gods, almost fourteen billion years ago, things happened without any discernable context. There were no recognizable patterns. It was all incoherent… A terrarium containing three tiny teenage girls mouthing high-pitched gibberish (like Mothra’s fairies, except for their wasted pallors, big t*ts, and T-shirts that read “I Don’t Do White Guys”) would inexplicably materialize, and then, just as inexplicably, disappear. And then millions and millions of years would pass, until, seemingly out of nowhere, there’d be, fleetingly… the smell of fresh rolls. Then several billion years of inert monotony… and then… a houndstooth pattern EVERYWHERE for approximately 10^-37 seconds…

Any good writer can paint vivid mental pictures. But Leyner — a former technical writer for medical instruments — paints vivid mental pictures about the weirdest stuff you can imagine.

His Gods operate not from Mount Olympus, but somewhere in Dubai, and at times in downtown Manhattan, a place that’s likened to “the Manhattan Project meets Warhol’s Factory.” There, they concoct whatever their whims desire, and do the things Gods are known to do — such as fornicate regularly with humans.

The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack follows the exploits of Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher from New Jersey, as the gods and goddesses — with exotic names like XOXO, La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali — work their magical machinations. The first part of the book is almost a survey course in alternate-universe mythology — how the gods and goddesses created the universe before retiring to their Dubai skyscrapers. It features endless permutations of a creation myth not to be found anywhere in The Golden Bough.

It’s like Leyner has got hold of reams of Greek mythology and shot it through the same machine Jeff Goldblum stepped into in The Fly — with weirdly reassembled DNA, all echoing the author’s strange, ongoing fascination with Italian male jewelry, Latina women, Sunkist orange soda and pumped-up pecs.

Hey, at least he’s consistent.

Other times he just barrels ahead on eight cylinders of random technical prose:

He likes to fillip the soul’s mind with his index finger so that it oscillates back and forth trillions of times a second between, what he called, “its regular state and its antimatter state.”

This hyperoscillation, XOXO explained, is that state of mind called “going into the forest to gather wild garlic.”

Does The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack make any sense? It does, if you chance upon it in the right frame of mind. It’s repetitive (on purpose), offering a kind of running Greek chorus and professorial commentary on its own origins (“The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack” being the name of the epic myth in question). When you’re in a hyped mood, Leyner’s jiving prose can be a real tonic, something like Kerouac mixed with Neal Cassady’s physicality. And of course, like the Greek models it’s modeled on, it’s a tragedy: Ike’s gonna buy it, at some point (this is not a spoiler; it’s revealed in the opening chapter).

Perhaps the overall theme of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is what passes for entertainment today: everything from reality TV and celebs to Cirque de Soleil is thrown into the Leyner mix, like endless channel surfing. Just as we’re dependent upon the whims of an entertainment industry for our diversions, the people in Leyner’s world are subject to the whims of a vast network of gods and demigods whose primary epic is told first in “sections,” then “sessions,” then in “seasons” (echoing our appetite for the renewal of television series). Snatches of reality come to us in interviews, text messages and recited bits of narrative. One phenomenological keystone comes from a random Real Wife who, when interviewed, points out that our brains can only handle a finite amount of information, which we then use to assemble a mental version of the “reality” that exists outside our minds. Therefore, this “reality” has no extrinsic basic in fact; it’s just a projection of all our individual mind constructions. This might begin to explain what the author’s getting at here: Welcome to his mind construction.

There is something dementedly brilliant about Leyner’s reassembling of our reality, even though I’m damned if I totally “get” it.  Some might even call it visionary. (Fan John Cusack calls it “synapse-shattering.”) If it’s a vision, it might well be a vision of a candy-coated hell, with all the bells and whistles.