Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Experts were abuzz recently over a video that was posted online purportedly showing Ike Kartonand Meir Poznakas teenagers at the Newport Mall in Jersey City: both boys were wearing black pants, identical padded and oversize cargo coats, and matching brown fur hats. The date of the video is unknown, although judging from the horses tied to posts and the honky-tonk piano version of “The Ballad of the Last of the Severed Bard-Heads” that’s audible every time the doors of the saloon swing open, it appears to have been shot in the late 1870s.

Saturday: 3:00 AM Eastern

“ The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva): The Fitted Cap”

The most enduring legacy of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva) —which is what most experts now consider to be the authentic title of the epic — may well be the fitted cap.

This unique, custom-fitted cap (95 % wool, 5 % cotton) features a gleaming “textured” white crown and visor — a trompe l’oeil corrugation (think super-close-up of a Frosted Mini-Wheat, abstracted into a scrotal topography). Embroidered (raised) over this glittering, puckered white dome (signifying, of course, “the sugar frosted nutsack”) — and foregrounded in such glaring contradistinction that they seem to float over it, like 3-D — are the words “ The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 3 ” in a shade of dazzlingly vivid, preternatural blue (think Gatorade Frost Glacier Freeze or Frost Cascade Crash or Pine-Sol Sparkling Wave). Embroidered below, in an equally vivid, man-made shade of red or pink (think Ajax Ruby Red Grapefruit Dish Liquid or Pepto-Bismol), is the subtitle: Hmm Uh (Rig Diva) .

Beginning on the underside of the visor and continuing to concentrically wind around the circumference of the inside of the cap, inscribed in the tiny, maddeningly meticulous hand of XOXOhimself, is the looping, recursive epic in its entirety, with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion…

…culminating in the final words of the epic (as Ike Kartonpeers deeply into the fiery eyes of his lover/doppelgänger/killer, Meir Poznak, in which, of course, he sees the reflection of his own fiery eyes, in which are reflected the fiery eyes of his lover/doppelgänger/killer, Meir Poznak, which again, of course, reflect his own fiery eyes, etc., etc., etc.…two fiery orbs becoming smaller and smaller and smaller with each mirrored iteration…receding into the infinite depths of this mise en abyme …of course, like the red taillights of a bus receding into the farthest-flung depths of a fathomless distance…disappearing into the scintillating somethingness of the nothingness that never was…), Ike Karton’s cryptic dying words, which are, of course, “One size…fits all.”

Rick Moody:So, I think it’s twelve or fifteen years since your last novel, correct?

Mark Leyner:I don’t know exactly. Some gaping period, some inexplicable period of time.

RM:The obvious question is: Why did it take so long to write The Sugar Frosted Nutsack ? Part of that has to do with what you did instead for a while. But from the point of view of fiction writing, did you do other things because you felt like the form wasn’t amenable to you after the last novel?

ML:When you say, What took so long? — that’s a beautiful way to phrase it, because I like to think of it now as some sort of necessary exile that resulted in this book. But some of the reasons for taking that break were aesthetic, and some were practical. I had done a number of books then, starting with I Smell Esther Williams and ending with The Tetherballs of Bougainville . And I thought at the time that I had thoroughly explored a series of issues about writing fiction, and I wanted to take a break because I wasn’t feeling a kind of urgency or avidity about it anymore. When I say “explored,” I don’t necessarily mean I worked from a more primitive exploration in the first book and then peaked with the most sophisticated in the last. I’m not even sure that’s the case.

But when I started publishing, I was woefully naive about the career of a writer. I didn’t know you had to put a book out every couple of years to renew your membership in the club of writers. I just thought you did it because you were overtaken by a burst of enthusiasm about venturing into certain places. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea that this is what you have to do to make a career. And then my wife and I had a kid, and I started to think things through more practically. I had a little bubble of public attention at that time, and I already knew that wasn’t going to last forever. So there were two factors simultaneously: one was a certain fatigue with this automotive model of putting out a book each year or two, and the other was the desire to try some other things that might be lucrative, like journalism or teaching. I mean, I could go on about why I didn’t end up doing those things, why I didn’t teach, if you’re interested.

RM:Well, what I’m really curious about is how this book called to you out of the silence. Was part of the twelve years thinking about how to write this book?

ML:To some degree I live like a kidnapping victim: just someone who is blindfolded and put in a trunk, and then the car stops and I’m let out. And if you look at any one period of time in my life, it seems like there’s some plotted trajectory, but it’s much more sporadic and random than that.

I think that a lot of the time was spent — again, some of this is very mundane — a lot of that time was spent working with other people on various things, like going back and forth to Los Angeles and working on all sorts of movie projects, some completely misbegotten and futile, some not. Different things like that, but all very collaborative projects.

I’m a very shy person who took to writing because I like being by myself, and in those years I found myself in a life that required such a degree of social activity that, eventually, it pressed me back into just wanting to be by myself. Certainly being confined within one’s thinking is one of the subjects of the book, you know, living within the universe of your own cognition. I wrote this book in such isolation. I had never written anything like this before. I didn’t show a sentence to anyone, from the beginning to the end. I didn’t do readings. All of those things can be comforting. You’re writing and you flash a little of it to someone and they appreciate it, and you think, OK. But I didn’t want that kind of comfort this time. I believed I needed to be steeped in the real, intransigently pure, lone wolf world of this book, that it would make this book such a strange piece of work if I had to just finally, truly trust myself about it the whole way through. It changed the taste of the book for me. And I love that so much more than any other thing — the feeling I get when I’m most involved in working, when writing this book. I feel the most vivid sense of being alive I have as a human being. And that’s what I had been away from for a long time, and it really did feel like a ridiculous exile, but one that was necessary when I look back on it.