New Jersey has the best pizza in the world, the fattest governor in the world, and the best surrealist-post-modern hyperkinetic meta-fiction writer in the world . . . his name is Mark Leyner and he's just written a new novel, called The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, after a fifteen year hiatus (his last novel was The Tetherballs of Bougainville) and I won't even try to summarize the "plot" but I believe it's a send-up of how religious texts are transmitted to mortals, edited by mortals-- think Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea on Ecstasy-- and finally canonized . . . with major digressions about the worship of celebrities and the female anatomy-- but a synopsis does the book no justice, so I will simply present you with a long sample passage, verbatim (the ellipses are Leyner's) because this is the best way for me to review the book . . . if you like this passage, then go for it:
--the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball dribbling nine year old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play: ". . . he's got a lot going on that could potentially distract him . . . algebra midterm . . . his mom's calling him to come inside . . . his asthma inhaler just fell out of his pocket . . . but somehow he totally shuts all that out of his mind . . . crowd's going ca-razy! . . . but the kid's in his own private Idaho . . . clock's ticking down . . . badass craves the drama . . . lives for this shit . . . Gunslingaaah . . . he can hear the automatic garage-door opener . . . that means his dad's gonna be pulling into the driveway in, like, fifteen seconds . . . un-fucking believeable that he's about to take this shot under this kind of pressure, with the survival of the species on the line . . . and look at him out there--- dude's ice . . . is this guy human or what? . . . his foot's hurting from when he stepped on his retainer in his room last night . . . but he can play with pain . . . we've seen that time and time again . . . he's stoic . . . a cold-blooded professional . . . Special Ops . . . Hitman with the Wristband . . . hand-eye coordination like a Cyborg Assassin . . . his mom's calling him to dinner . . . the woman is doing everything she can possibly do to rattle him . . . but this guy's not like the rest of us . . . he is un-fucking-flappable . . . he dribbles between his legs . . . OK, hold on . . . he dribbles between his legs . . . hold on . . . he dribbles . . . hold on . . . he dribbles between his legs (yes!) . . . fakes right, fakes left, double pump-fakes . . . there's one second left on the clock . . . and he launches . . . an impossibly . . . long . . . fadeaway . . . jumpaaah . . . it's off the rim . . . but he fights for the offensive rebound like some kind of rabid samarai . . . throwing vicious elbows like lethally honed swords . . . the severed heads of opponents litter the court . . . spinal cords are sticking out of the neck stumps . . . but there's no ticky-tacky foul called, the referees are just letting them play . . . there's somehow still .00137 seconds left ont he clock . . . now there's a horn honking . . . might that be the War Conch of the Undead?"
