Mark Leyner, "Idyll"

blue cheese & office equipment

“I was reading an article that contained the words ‘vineyards, orchards, and fields bountiful with fruits and vegetables; sheep and goats graze on hillsides of lush greenery’ and I realized that in five months none of these things would exist and I realized that as the last sheep on earth is skinned, boned, filleted, and flash-frozen, Arleen and I would probably be making love for the last time, mingling — for the last time — the sweet smell of her flesh which is like hyacinths and narcissus with the virile tang of my own which is like pond scum and headcheese and then I realized that the only thing that would distinguish me in the eyes of posterity from — for instance — those three sullen Chinese yuppies slumped over in their bentwood chairs at the most elegant McDonald’s in the world is that I wrote the ads that go: ‘Suddenly There’s Vancouver!’”

Recommending Mark Leyner I feel as if I’m walking up to knots of people at a party and thrusting before them samples of an unspeakably pungent blue cheese. Half — probably more than half — of the guests will mount a refusal so visceral and emphatic that it will verge on panic. The other half, though, will take a bite, close their eyes, and experience a pleasure so intense and complex that they will, for a few seconds, forget the party completely.

I count myself among the blue cheese savorers, but I understand the rejecters’ position; a part of me even shares it. This does not, I must at some level acknowledge, smell good. And yet… 

Mark Leyner does something for me that no other writer does, something that no other writer even tries to do. I read him when my mind’s plumbing needs not just snaking but hydro-jetting — an industrial strength blast of hyper-vivid oddity. He’s never created a character worth remembering, and I’m not sure I can recall a single scene he’s written, but that’s because characters and scenes aren’t what he traffics in. He traffics in words — the angular, miraculous, multitudinous things themselves. 

So let’s look at those words.

But first, for the uninitiated: Mark Leyner belongs, taxonomically, somewhere in the lineage of Douglas Coupland, David Foster Wallace, and Robert Coover. Which is to say that he once had a goatee and that a certain Gen X aura of sunglasses and coffee shop anti-consumerism trails him still. He wrote a handful of uncategorizably bizarre books in the 90’s, took a break (during which — as if determined to live out one of his random-meaning-generator sentences — he cowrote the bestselling book of medical trivia, Why Do Men Have Nipples?), and then, with 2012’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, he picked right back up where he left off. 

His books are full of — they are delivery mechanisms for — spiky little word clusters of hypnotic weirdness: “larval psychotics,” “shimmering, serrated monster,” “epoxied chunks of chipmunk meat.” He is, in other words, a poet — a poet whose vocabulary derives not from nature but from infomercials, action movies, and Saturday morning cartoons. It’s therefore tempting to dismiss him as a bit of historic cultural flotsam, the literary equivalent of an MTV veejay — until you sit down and read him. His idiosyncratic brilliance is no more of the 90’s than Emily Dickinson’s was of the 1870’s. His books will be, or anyway should be, read as long as there are people silently staring at pieces of paper for fun.

The book to start with is My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, his 1992 collection of short stories (or short something’s). Here, in its entirety, is the story “Idyll”:

“I was reading an article that contained the words ‘vineyards, orchards, and fields bountiful with fruits and vegetables; sheep and goats graze on hillsides of lush greenery’ and I realized that in five months none of these things would exist and I realized that as the last sheep on earth is skinned, boned, filleted, and flash-frozen, Arleen and I would probably be making love for the last time, mingling — for the last time — the sweet smell of her flesh which is like hyacinths and narcissus with the virile tang of my own which is like pond scum and headcheese and then I realized that the only thing that would distinguish me in the eyes of posterity from — for instance — those three sullen Chinese yuppies slumped over in their bentwood chairs at the most elegant McDonald’s in the world is that I wrote the ads that go: ‘Suddenly There’s Vancouver!’”

The first thing to notice about this sentence is that it’s a sentence. The second thing is that it sounds sensible. In its music, its shapeliness, its sinuous journey toward its exclamatory end, it resembles the English prose that you might find in a book club pick, maybe something by Franzen or Egan. There’s nothing in its form that would snap the drowsing Audible listener awake.

But its content is, of course, insane — and insane in the particular electrified, self-responsive way that characterizes Leyner’s best work. Fiction writers are perpetually asking themselves, What is the most interesting thing I could do here? By here they mean: in this chapter, in this section, in this character’s arc. Leyner operates at a different frame rate: he scans for the maximally interesting possibility multiple times per sentence.

The first forty words of “Idyll” cohere; they could be the opening of a novel about an impending enviro-apocalypse.  

I was reading an article that contained the words ‘vineyards, orchards, and fields bountiful with fruits and vegetables; sheep and goats graze on hillsides of lush greenery’ and I realized that in five months none of these things would exist

OK, we think. Maybe a nuclear blast is coming. So far, so parse-able. But then we come to the last sheep on Earth, and its uncomfortably-dwelt-upon demise.

and I realized that as the last sheep on Earth is skinned, boned, filleted, and flash-frozen

Flash-frozen is, for me, the moment when this sentence surrenders its Ordinary Prose membership card. The logic of enviro-apocalypse has departed, and the logic of food-prep has set in. That list of verbs (skinned, boned, filleted) has acted as an incantation on our poor suggestible narrator, and it has carried him, apparently, into the realm of fast food commercials.

But there’s hope, because here comes Arleen and the order-restoring pull of lovemaking. Sex with a beloved is the sort of thing that might happen in a doomsday literary novel, right? Surely this will get us back on track. 

Arleen and I would probably be making love for the last time, mingling — for the last time      

Nice rhythmic repetition! Emphasizing the last-ness of this last time is just what we’d hope tender sex-treasuring prose would do. 

— the sweet smell of her flesh which is like hyacinths and narcissus

Well, our narrator has briefly been bashed over the head with a romance novel, but no matter, we’re describing smells, we’re creating parallels.

with the virile tang of my own which is like pond scum and headcheese  

And we’re off the tracks again. He has fallen into the mineshaft of smell-description (just as he previously fell into the mineshaft of sheep-dismemberment) and forgotten entirely the loving, poignant business in which he was engaged. 

But anyway, the sex is finished. The narrator’s eyes, pained by the brightness of apocalypse, softened by the affections of Arleen, are turning now toward eternity. 

and then I realized that the only thing that would distinguish me in the eyes of posterity from — for instance — those three sullen Chinese yuppies slumped over in their bentwood chairs

This is sounding a bit specific to be a for instance, but yes, go on.

at the most elegant McDonald’s in the world

OK. Whatever. Just tell us what it is that distinguishes you. We can see the end of the sentence — not to mention the story, and the world — approaching. Take us home.

is that I wrote the ads that go: ‘Suddenly There’s Vancouver!’

This finale, with its exultant exclamation point, is the literary equivalent of stamping hard on a stair that turns out to be a landing — and it is the moment that always, no matter how many times I read it, makes me smile in baffled admiration. Here Leyner has led us, by the grammar and “logic” of the sentence, to expect a triumphant bugle blast — and instead he’s produced the sort of tagline, perfectly calibrated in its banality, that we’ve all found ourselves staring at in irritable torpor (Who writes these things?) on empty train platforms.

And now he’s bowing.

Because what he’s actually done here — in the guise of delivering a lyrical account of one man’s attempt at reckoning with the apocalypse — is engage us in a kind of highbrow game. We have no choice, as well-trained readers, but to seek coherence; to provide necessary set-decoration; to translate sound into imagery. Leyner is one of the shockingly few writers who recognize the comic potential in this state of affairs. Presented with the fragile, expensive office equipment that is our language-comprehension machinery, most writers type up solemn memos and set about mastering the communications system. Leyner makes Xeroxes of his own butt.