FICTION

ET TU, BABE by Mark Leyner (Harmony Books: $17; 160 pp.). In “Et Tu, Babe,” Mark Leyner describes what he’s been up to since “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist” made him a cult author; in his very own words, it’s been “one long ultraviolent hyperkinetic nightmare.”

A fictional nightmare, that is. Leyner’s real life is said to be normal, even humdrum. But his fantasy life . . . well, imagine what Dave Barry’s columns would read like if he didn’t write for family newspapers. Imagine Donald Barthelme ingesting a few hundred cc of Amazon wahoo juice and, with wild karate cries, splooshing you in the face with a giant pizza topped with megalomania, paranoia, conspicuous consumption, media hype, kinky sex, comic-book horror, and a vial of Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath swiped from the Smithsonian Institution while, with the other hand, he scribbles Einstein’s equations for anchovy sauce on the blackboard. . . . Whew! This stuff’s catching.

The plot of “Et Tu, Babe” is a parody of the modern celebrity story: the ballooning ego, the mushrooming entourage, the security force, the proliferating endorsements, the schmoozing with other celebrities, the betrayals and, finally, the strategic disappearance. More important, though, is Leyner’s method, which is to jam together pop genres and spoofs of genres, weird science, police reports and references to classic literature (which show up looking a little astonished) into a glop of information overload that may, stretching just a bit, resemble the contents of the average American mind.

The trouble with reviews is that they take things too seriously. The above paragraph is an example. This novel isn’t going to last, though Leyner, whose narrator and namesake likes to call himself “the most intense, and in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America,” no doubt would reply: “So what? Lots of sober, ‘serious,’ critic-approved books don’t last either. And they aren’t as funny as this one.” He’d have a point.