Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“It’s also tricky deciding which pen name to assign to which novel. The novel about the yuppie serial murderer is originally attributed to ‘Mona Simpson,’ the novel about the terrible father who owns a biotechnology company to ‘Bret Easton Ellis,’ the one about the middle-class, 19-year-old drama student who moonlights as a $1,000-a-night prostitute to ‘David Foster Wallace,’ and the hefty opus about the tennis academy and 12-step programs to ‘Jennifer Belle,’ before Mark and Polo decide that these are not felicitous pairings.

“Some reviewers have remarked that the pseudonymous anagrams constitute The Tetherballs of Bougainville ’s major artistic achievement. Snideness aside, they are impressive. After seeing the movie, I spent three days checking the noms de plume to confirm that they transpose back into the Bougainvillean surnames. They do.

“I’ve previously discussed how the phenomenon of the male-adolescent-sequestered-in-his-bedroom is fundamental to this movie. Surely, anagrammatizing the names of tetherball stars is the obsessive activity par excellence of the druggy 13-year-old ensconced in his lair.

“Mark considers these novels to be the best collaborative work he’s done since the paper on fraternity-hazing deaths at the Fashion Institute of Technology that he wrote with his dad.

“And he sends the completed manuscripts — now attributed to the fabricated noms de plume — to various agents and publishers in New York.

“Meanwhile, Mark begins dating Lehrerasha. And they become the toast of the Bougainville beau monde , fawned upon by the supercilious sommeliers at La Petite Sangsue, club-hopping through the shantytowns of Kieta, necking in the backseat of her Toyota Land Cruiser as drovers pass by, switching the rumps of their oxen — Lehrerasha naked except for her vibrating beeper and the Breathe Right nasal strip across the bridge of her nose. They party with the tetherball superstars, and become, along with Offramp Tavanipupu, official co-cynosures of Kieta’s cultural vanguard. And during the Ma Ling Masters, they swig Cherry fX Bomb in the luxurious sky-box used by Oshimitsu Polymer execs. Oshimitsu Polymers is, of course, the world’s leading manufacturer of tetherball tether.

“Thanks to Mark and Polo’s success in marketing Colonel Alebua and his regime, dictators, warlords, corrupt corporations, and criminal cartels from around the world seek out their services and become clients. Tyrants, despots, and terrorists of every nationality, ethnicity, and ideology; Cosa Nostra families, yakuza clans, and Hong Kong triads; chemical and metallurgy companies that pump dioxins and PCBs into reservoirs and aquifers; rapacious mining and logging conglomerates; makers of tainted baby formula, botulism-contaminated vichyssoise, and mercury-laden facial creams; fast-food chains whose burgers are saturated with E. coli , shigella, and necrotizing fascitis Strep A; athletes who habitually molest, defenestrate, crucify, and then bury alive their wives, children, and in-laws; etc.

“They post $677.3 million in billing for the first quarter.

“It’s Heart of Darkness , and Mark is Kurtz.

“But it’s Kurtz as Maurice Saatchi.

“They expand into a full-service agency. Their ‘manpower’ agency, which has been providing temps for governments that need, say, an agent provocateur for entrapping members of an opposition group, evolves into a full-fledged talent-management company with a comprehensive roster of mellifluous BBC-accented foreign ministers, venal judges for annulling presidential and parliamentary elections, and pliant figureheads for giving your regime that imprimatur of legitimacy.

“They even take Colonel Alebua and members of his junta to the mountains one weekend for a synergy- and trust-building training retreat.

“The evolution of The Bougainville Group into the world’s largest mercenary advertising and infotainment company is more than the world’s traditional ad agencies can stomach. They begin to fund a coalition of armed groups dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Alebua government.

“The first to open their coffers to the insurgents are McCann-Erickson, J. Walter Thompson, and BBDO Worldwide, jointly underwriting a full armored division, a dozen helicopter gunships, a Medevac, a twin-rotor Chinook, and an amphibious assault ship.

“At Young and Rubicam, a volunteer brigade, made up of passionately committed mail-room clerks and entry-level copywriters, sets out for the Solomon Islands. The war in Bougainville is, for these brave and idealistic Y&R volunteers, what the Spanish Civil War was to the generation of Hemingway — the defining moral conflict of its era, a conflict for which many give their lives.

“Each week another agency aligns itself with the rebels: Ogilvy & Mather, Grey, Chiat/Day, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Ammirati Puris Lintas, Wells Rich Greene BDDP, Leo Burnett, DDB Needham, Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago, Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis.

“Weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, logistical support, and advisory personnel pour in; sophisticated real-time satellite surveillance is provided.

“The tide of the civil war begins to turn. The Alebua regime begins to crumble.

“The rebels gain control of the outlying provinces and advance on Kieta. In broadcasts from their clandestine radio station (a ‘lite’ rebel station — more music, less inflammatory rhetoric) and in a front-page editorial in Advertising Age , it’s announced that, if they aren’t captured, Alebua and Mark will be tried and executed in absentia.

“With the rebel troops some 48 hours from the capital, Colonel Alebua prepares to flee the country.

“Lehrerasha asks Mark to come live with her in Europe.

“ ‘Daddy has a chateau in Luxembourg. We could be so happy.’

“ ‘I can’t,’ Mark says. ‘Look, Lehrerasha, it’s been a great summer, but … I’ve gotta get back to Maplewood. School starts soon … and, y’know, I miss my friends — Sylvia and Felipe and everybody.’

“He drapes a lei of frangipani blossoms around her neck and kisses her.

“ ‘Good-bye … it’s been, like, really, really great. Really!’ he calls to her, as she sashays across the tarmac and boards the cargo transport plane that her father’s bodyguards are loading with $66 million in gold bullion and the original prints of all their movies.

“Polo is presumably dead. He’s reportedly last seen knuckle-walking disorientedly through a mine field and into a free-fire zone.

“Mark manages to escape, hidden on a fishing trawler, the night before the country falls to the rebels. As the vessel pulls past boats swaying languidly in the soporific heat, and the menacing, blackish-purple palisades and jagged promontories of Bougainville recede in the distance, the rhythmic thud of mortar rounds is a lulling accompaniment to the khat he chews.

“(The fact that khat, a shrub cultivated exclusively in the Middle East and Africa, appears to be widely available in Bougainville, is one of several ethnobotanical incongruities in this movie. This is either a deliberate allusion to an active, multilateral global marketplace in indigenous intoxicants or simply the result of lazy fact-checking. I suspect the latter.)

“Arriving in the United States, Mark makes the appalling discovery that impostors are claiming to be the fabricated authors of all the novels that he and Polo wrote. Who these people are, Mark has no idea — out-of-work actors, streetwise professional con artists, perhaps even disillusioned and cynical young editors or agents. Whoever they are, they have successfully assumed the identities of each and every anagrammatized nom de plume, and secured fat six-figure book deals. The novels are published with intense media buzz, and launched with glittering, bibulous parties at the trendiest boîtes in Manhattan. The sham ‘novelists’ are feted and photographed by the intellectual, fashion and entertainment magazines, rocketed off on whirlwind 15-city national book tours, interviewed on Fresh Air, The Today Show, Charlie Rose , etc. A number of the books have become huge best-sellers, several even hit movies.