LAST ORGY OF THE DIVINE HERMIT

Experimental storytelling keeps Leyner's latest novel whirling around.

Narrative form is an ever malleable plaything in Leyner’s ostentatiously acrobatic new novel. In the simplest possible terms, it’s about a decrepit old anthropologist and his daughter at work on a book about the Chalazian Mafia Faction. Much of the novel is written in the form of a play, in which a patient narrates the action from the words that appear on her optometrist’s eye chart. And so on. Bring a dictionary: The author delights in layering slabs of vocab onto the page (“In another version, the Father and Daughter (named Caesar and Little Madonna) are extinct, rodent-like mammals called multituberculates who’ve been kept in a cryostat for several years”). Folding in on itself in dizzying postmodern loops, setting up motifs and tweaking them in a jazzy frenzy, this is a book written by someone who knows how smart he is. It isn’t so much an invitation as a challenge—if you finish this novel and like it, you must be a being of superior ambition and intelligence. Either that or you have a very high stake in your own literary endurance. Leyner delights in unusual, world-in-a-grain-of-sand narrative delivery; the action in his 2016 novel/memoir/all of the above, Gone With the Mind, takes place in a food court, where the character Mark Leyner holds forth and tells the story to his mom. On the one hand it’s exciting when a book blows narrative convention to smithereens. That said, you don’t read Leyner’s latest so much as you work at it, one allusion-packed page at a time. There’s no distinction between high and low culture here. One moment Leyner quotes a long passage from dance critic Jennifer Homans; a while later comes a riff on “Ryan Murphy’s limited series about a nasal, anorexic, handcuffed Momofuku Noodle Bar dishwasher’s festering toupee fetish.” Because, why not? This is ultimately the book’s saving grace: It is frequently, shamelessly funny enough to make the toil worthwhile.

Bring your vocabulary chops with you; you'll be needing them.