Well could be fancy and say its a post modernist novel with a form that counters the tyranny of the outdated narrative and naturalist tradition. Its plot: son at father's failed execution; father enrolled in the State's lotto prisoner execution programme, son writes a screenplay is merely a rack for lots of streams of conciousness/montage pieces.

I love books that break with conventions but when they engage me and not being just fun for the writer. I loved 253 or The Saddlebag for example. This is supposed to be his most novel like book but it reads like he lacks the discipline to write for the reader. Or at least not the sober drug free reader...it must be a profound read if stoned

( )

This was a horrible book!!! I am hard pressed to not find *something* to like in the books I read, but each page of this "book" was excruciatingly painful to read. Leyner is trying so hard to be witty, outrageous, and funny - but all that came out was "verbal diarrhea", if you will.

This book had rave reviews on the back - but I think the reviewers were on crack. His attempts at humor, satire, or "social criticism" failed miserably. Luckily, the book was a fairly quick read, so I only wasted a few hours on this horrid writing. ( )

Set about 10 minutes into the future, in an America that's just like ours, only more so, "The Tetherballs of Bougainville" is a pitch-black, pomo comedy that takes dead aim at American celebrity culture.

Everything in the book is taken to extremes, be it the casual violence, the brand-name name-checking of every thing, from weaponry to perfume, or the crazed, drug-fuelled sex techniques.

But I mean this all in a good way.

For example, the protagonist's screenplay makes up the second half of the novel, and there's one scene where "a coffee-guzzling, Liquid Paper-huffing Polo and Mark endeavor long into the night, endlessly rearranging and re-rearranging letters in order to anagrammatize the players' surnames into appropriately authorial-sounding pseudonyms."

Now, keep in mind that "Polo" is a hairless Bonobo monkey (actually Mark's father after getting his genes manipulated so he can hide from a State of New Jersey death squard) "dictating" the novels to Mark in sign language. And the two are making up names to put on the novels, and decide to use those from professional tetherball players from the Solomon Islands, Bougainville to be exact.

So that "By early morning, Mel'Chachanibo has been transposed to 'Michael Chabon.' Tranttando has eventually been working into 'Donna Tartt.' Gascand-Pupulolo is anagrammatically reshuffled into 'Douglas Coupland.'"

Of course, there's a problem with this: "No one wants to believe that Microserfs and Infinite Jest and Prozac Nation and The End of Alice were all written by a Bonobo chimp and a 13-year-old boy smoking weed and drinking forties in their bedroom!"

If you think this kind of thing is funny, "Tetherballs" (and Leyner's "My cousin, my gastroenterologist") are for you. ( )