Tooth Imprints On a Corn Dog

Starred review from January 30, 1995
This hodgepodge of short stories, comic sketches, and one play is in the same fantastic, satirical vein as Leyner's (Et Tu, Babe) earlier fiction, with its disjointed, slapstick style, its surrealist tricks and its lusty appetite for mass culture, trendy society, low humor and high technology. Yet as Leyner reports here (in a dispatch from his ``benthic pied-a-terre/atelier'' in the Marianna Trench), he is now a father, and as a result much of this book concerns themes of fertility, childbirth and childcare, as well as anxieties about his new role as bourgeois breadwinner. Among these more or less fictional, often hilarious stories are accounts of Leyner's attempt to buy an Armani backpack for his daughter's Haute Barbie ($3450 at Bergdorf Goodman); his reading Rimbaud's Season in Hell to her (punctuating each line with a loud moo), and other efforts to be a good father ``without losing his edge.'' The centerpiece is ``The Making of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog,'' which recounts 36 hours spent in the Chateau Marmont, composing 1000 lines of free verse under deadline to Der Gummiknuppel (``the German equivalent to Martha Stewart Living but with more nudity and grisly crime''). These variations on Leyner's hallmark hyper-intellectual, amphetamine-feuled, narrative channel-surfing will not surprise his increasing fans; nor will they disappoint.