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It makes sense that an author who writes not quite like anyone else would promote his new book in a novel way. While on a traditional national bookstore and media tour to flog his new novel, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Mark Leyner has taken his tour into cyberspace. When you log on to a publicity site for his book, you'll find not only the usual hyperbolic swill, but, more importantly, you can hear from the author himself as he reads from his novel and adds new entries to his Tour Diary.
"I'm a late-comer to the Web, but an enthusiastic one," Leyner says.
However, a rigorous touring schedule can have even authors with the best intentions falling down on their commitments. While the first set of diary entries, which begin in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and end in Austin, Texas, recount meetings with attractive tour handlers, a trip to a local fish market, speculations on roadkill, and the joys of room service, the second round of entries - the ones coming after a few days home with his wife and daughter - will probably not be so detailed. "I'm worried about the second installment, because I stopped taking notes," he confessed. "The new installment will be characterized by brevity and fabrication."
"Brevity and fabrication" is a good way to describe most of Leyner's work. An essayist, novelist, and short-story writer, his output is characterized by intelligence, a deeply satirical eye, a tight lyrical prose style, a hunger for raw information, and a desire to share his info with readers (a habit that had him characterized as a cyberpunk, a label he strongly denies). Imagine a rock and roll influenced by Woody Allen or a Chernobyl-mutated S. J. Perelman.
The Tetherballs of Bougainville (Harmony Books) is the story of the 13-year-old boy named Mark Leyner who is in jail awaiting his father's execution by lethal injection. The fictional Leyner is waiting somewhat distractedly. The boy is up for a screenplay prize and needs to get some work done. Dad's general naughtiness and impending offing are really eating a hole in his day....
Part autobiography, part screenplay, and part movie review, Tetherballs is not a long book, but it's certainly Leyner's most ambitious to date. Each section, screenplay, biography, and review, are funhouse mirrors of each other, reflecting weirdly and changing what came before and what comes after. "Of all my books, this is the one in which I was most devoted to the formal structure," he says.
Leyner's tour, both real and virtual, ends in LA, where he is taking time out to discuss an upcoming movie version of his novel Et Tu, Babe (starring Cameron Diaz and Vincent D'Onofrio) and pitching a television series. "When in Rome," he says. "I'd feel like an idiot if I left LA without having a pitch meeting."
Now that he's discovered the joys of the online world - confessing that he often surfs the Web for six hours at a stretch - might he abandon the rigors of daily jet flights and leaving his family behind for long periods? Not likely. "The tour has been fun," he says. "Besides, Tetherballs took me two, two and a half years to write, and I have the sense of being in some kind of underground laboratory concocting this thing which is designed to provoke a certain set of responses. And I don't have the luxury of being able to do any animal testing. When I come out and read to people, I have eyewitness confirmation that I've been right in my calculations."
