I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten less and less gregarious, much more solitary, more reclusive. And speaking in terms of the autobiographical aspect, this is a very honest book about being older, about death, about sex and the kind of women I find uniquely attractive. And it’s about the realization that at some point I’m not going to elude the captivity of myself as I once thought I would. And that’s good and bad. I’m just deeper in the catacombs of my own captivity. I can say without question that this is what this book is about to a degree.
RM: So the structural recursion is emblematic of that?
ML: Yes, absolutely.
RM: I want to arrive at a summarizing question. Now that you’ve written a novel after this long silence, is it still possible for you to look back on what you’ve done before and see this as part and parcel of that endeavor, or does it belong in a completely new phase of Mark Leyner?
ML: If possible, both. It’s important to me that my work be unlike that of anybody else — and that’s not important to everybody, but it’s always been to me. To an unusual degree in my work, this book is the apogee of that desire for originality, and in that way it’s not completely separate phenomena from the rest of my work. I haven’t started anew somehow. But I think it’s the purest version of what I do, and it’s the beginning point to move forward with my writing. With this book, I tried to write sentences that so destabilize the preceding sentences that a different kind of book is created and undermined line by line. I think that achieves something meaningful. I’m very aware of choreographing a response from a reader, almost in a medical way. It’s like saying, Oh, we’re going to inject this now. Let’s see what happens. Reading is just a series of micro-effects on the consciousness of the reader. I want my writing to require the kind of attention on the part of a reader that I hope is a hyper-vivid experience of reading, of being alive, of trying to contort your thinking to grapple with something. With this book, I was more acutely aware than ever of the mechanics of creating that kind of experience, and I think there are a lot more places to take that that I haven’t yet. I think there might have been a time when I thought that my work would become more conventional or narrative, and you can see in the books before — to the extent that any of those words mean anything to me — they sort of did. The Tetherballs of Bougainville certainly had more of a story than My Cousin. And I know now that I don’t have any particular stake in narrative like that. I have an enormous stake in pursuing this program to create as sensational a series of lines and paragraphs and texts capable of the most radical destabilization as possible. This is not any sort of kind of automatic writing. As you have written about beautifully, and people have written about Artaud, to me, this is the most rigorous, scientific thing I’m doing. You could say that this book is the culmination of what I’ve done. But in another way, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is so distant from any other book I did in how stubborn, in how militantly, it is what it is. That’s been astonishing even to me.
Questions and topics for discussion
In a profile of Mark Leyner, journalist Adam Sternbergh called The Sugar Frosted Nutsack “a strange and indescribable novel, even by the standards of Leyner, purveyor of the strange and difficult to describe.” How would you describe this indescribable novel to a friend? And how would you describe the experience of describing the indescribable?
Mark Leyner wrote The Sugar Frosted Nutsack in complete isolation without receiving feedback or guidance from a single person throughout the process. In an interview, Leyner said, “This book had to have a certain completely enclosed, impenetrably claustrophobic kind of madness to it.” How does this compare to your personal experience reading the book? Have you ever had a similar experience in your own life of isolating yourself from the world?
The book poses the question “What Makes Ike a Hero?” followed by a list of sixteen hero-making qualities, including Ike’s hatred of the rich, his efforts to situate himself in history, his ongoing self-narration, and his unwavering belief in his untimely death, among others. In what ways does Ike resemble your idea of a hero?
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is peppered with a vast number of celebrities and influential people whose names we recognize (and sometimes don’t recognize), ranging from Jersey Shore’s Snooki to Japan’s minister of finance, Shoichi Nakagawa. Ike himself despises rich celebrities, and yet is practically a celebrity himself within the epic. What do you think Leyner is implying about celebrity culture? In what ways are celebrities present in your everyday life?
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has been described as a “visionary comedy” as well as “at times almost achingly sad.” What moments in the novel moved you, and why? What moments did you find funniest?
In addition to writing fiction, Mark Leyner has worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. How do you think Leyner’s experience with film and television influences his fiction? What elements of the book did you find particularly cinematic?
While The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, as an epic, is described, discussed, and analyzed, an epic tale is conspicuously missing, making a reading of this book much like reading an introduction to or review of a work without having access to the work itself. Discuss this kind of reading experience and what effect it had on you. Did you find it liberating, frustrating, or SUPER-SEXY?
What are your favorite Greek myths? Why do you think these myths have endured for so long? In what ways does The Sugar Frosted Nutsack draw from and muddle up the elements of the traditional Greek myth, and to what effect?
Many reviewers of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack have likened the book’s effect to that of mind-altering drugs. Drugs themselves play a large role in the epic, most notably when Ike and Vance get “SO high” on gravy. Do you think fiction can have a drug-like power to alter your mind? Discuss when fiction has done this for you.
“That the Gods only occur in Ike’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative.” Discuss the themes of religion and belief in the book. Do you think believing in something affirms its existence? What are the beliefs, religious or not, that are most important to you?