This is going to be short and to the point. I HATED Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe. I had a friend a long time ago who loved Leyner and the title of the book cracked me up. Well, the title was the first and last thing to give me even a twitch of amusement.
There isn’t really a plot, per se, just strings of absurd situations and painfully unfunny humor. It’s meant to be some kind of absurdist post-modern take on fame and culture, but it’s nothing of the sort. The main character is Mark Leyner himself, and the book is supposed to be his memoir, until he mysteriously disappears at the end of the book and we’re left with an oral history of his impact from such luminaries as Connie Chung.
Leyner is a world famous author in the book. A megalomaniac who is constantly rhapsodizing about his perfect physique, his sexcapades, and his literary brilliance. Every sentence is meant to be hysterical, which made me infinitely thankful the book was only 168 pages long. Leyner thinks it’s a riot to talk about tattoos on his internal organs, a miniature woman who he needs a “jewelry loupe to find her vagina,” which leads to him creating some kind of cloth treadmill on his penis for her to run on. Does that sound kind of funny? It’s not, trust me. No more funny than his wacky encounters with celebrities, his drug binge on an ampoule of Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath, juvenile sex scenes where his lovers rave about the orgasms he gives them, and some random sight gag with a tampon up his butt. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” you say to me, your faithful reviewer. Welcome to the club. It’s annoying in here.
I get the sense that Leyner thinks his book is some kind of homage to the works of Woody Allen, Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon. But it’s like a little kid at the playground constantly shouting at his mother, “Look at me, mom! Hey mom, look over here! Mom! Mom!” And we the reader are the exhausted mother wishing she had snuck a flask of whiskey in her bag.
I am so turned off by this “fun” book that my next read is about the survivors of the Holocaust.
