On Wired, Alice Gregory interviews Mark Leyner about the publication of his latest (and long, long awaited) novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. Leyner’s been a favorite of mine since I had my mind blown by My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, an almost indescribably weird (and convulsively funny) collection of sf stories made out of pure awesome. I can’t believe it’s been 15 years since his last fiction, and Nutsack sounds like it was worth the wait: “gods splinter into competitive factions, bicker in Dubai, and infect the mind of Ike Karton, an out-of-work butcher from New Jersey.”
Wired: As a self-consciously “current” writer, was it hard to write something that felt fresh and of-the-moment after so much time away?
Leyner: That’s a question that filled me with trepidation. The other books felt so congruent with the zeitgeist. When I started writing, I was a more social person, and I’m probably a bit more solitary now. My process was to just steep myself in my obsessions — all the capricious and fetishistic thinking that I’m engaged in. If I concerned myself with contemporary references, it would just detract from the strangeness of the book.
Wired: Your prose is data-rich: It features arcane medical jargon and tabloid factoids. What are your reading habits like? Do you have a system?
Leyner: I suppose I have a system, but it’s not really an a priori system. If at any given moment I look at the books that pile up next to the bed or in the space where I work, it looks like someone who is trying to read the most insanely miscellaneous and contradictory selection of books possible. Some of it is because I have very wide-ranging interests, but then some of this is because my reading is very tangential. I’ll read 30-40 pages, and then something will move me, so I’ll put that book down and start reading something else. They always tend to superimpose themselves on top of one another. I’m reading a book now about Stalin’s military prowess, and then I’m reading a really wonderful book by the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. Could there be more contradictory things than those two?
Gods Bicker in Mark Leyner’s Absurd New Novel, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack