The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (25 page)

1. In a profile of Mark Leyner, journalist Adam Sternbergh called
   The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   “a strange and indescribable novel, even by the standards of Leyner, purveyor of the strange and difficult to describe.” How would you describe this indescribable novel to a friend? And how would you describe the experience of describing the indescribable?
   
2. Mark Leyner wrote
   The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   in complete isolation without receiving feedback or guidance from a single person throughout the process. In an interview, Leyner said, “This book had to have a certain completely enclosed, impenetrably claustrophobic kind of madness to it.” How does this compare to your personal experience reading the book? Have you ever had a similar experience in your own life of isolating yourself from the world?
   
3. The book poses the question “What Makes Ike a Hero?” followed by a list of sixteen hero-making qualities, including Ike’s hatred of the rich, his efforts to situate himself in history, his ongoing self-narration, and his unwavering belief in his untimely death, among others. In what ways does Ike resemble your idea of a hero?
   
4. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   is peppered with a vast number of celebrities and influential people whose names we recognize (and sometimes don’t recognize), ranging from
   Jersey Shore
   ’s Snooki to Japan’s minister of finance, Shoichi Nakagawa. Ike himself despises rich celebrities, and yet is practically a celebrity himself within the epic. What do you think Leyner is implying about celebrity culture? In what ways are celebrities present in your everyday life?
   
5. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   has been described as a “visionary comedy” as well as “at times almost achingly sad.” What moments in the novel moved you, and why? What moments did you find funniest?
   
6. In addition to writing fiction, Mark Leyner has worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. How do you think Leyner’s experience with film and television influences his fiction? What elements of the book did you find particularly cinematic?
   
7. While
   The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
   as an epic, is described, discussed, and analyzed, an epic tale is conspicuously missing, making a reading of this book much like reading an introduction to or review of a work without having access to the work itself. Discuss this kind of reading experience and what effect it had on you. Did you find it liberating, frustrating, or SUPER-SEXY?
   
8. What are your favorite Greek myths? Why do you think these myths have endured for so long? In what ways does
   The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   draw from and muddle up the elements of the traditional Greek myth, and to what effect?
   
9. Many reviewers of
   The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
   have likened the book’s effect to that of mind-altering drugs. Drugs themselves play a large role in the epic, most notably when Ike and Vance get “SO high” on gravy. Do you think fiction can have a drug-like power to alter your mind? Discuss when fiction has done this for you.
   
10. “That the Gods only occur in Ike’s mind is not a refutation of their actuality. It is, on the contrary, irrefutable proof of their empirical existence. The Gods choose to only exist in Ike’s mind. They are real by virtue of this, their prerogative.” Discuss the themes of religion and belief in the book. Do you think believing in something affirms its existence? What are the beliefs, religious or not, that are most important to you?
    

Mark Leyner is the author of the novels
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu, Babe;
and
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
. His nonfiction includes the #1
New York Times
bestseller
Why Do Men Have Nipples?
He cowrote the movie
War, Inc.
and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog

Et Tu, Babe

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

I Smell Esther Williams and Other Stories

“The great Mark Leyner has returned. He’s brought with him a visionary comedy, a nearly epic exegesis of a wonderfully ludicrous (and somehow completely believable) epic, and, most important, a pantheistic belief system we can all finally get behind. Big-ass brilliance on every sun-kissed page.”

—Sam Lipsyte, author of
Home Land
and
The Ask

“Mark Leyner has cranked out one of his wild and blistering fictions; 2012 marks this cult figure’s return to the novel. His new, grand work of absurdity,
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
is a tale of ancient gods and modern men that carries both the social satire and dense, swinging prose that his fans have been pining for all this time.”

—Matthew Love,
Time Out New York

“America should treasure its rare, true original voices, and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!”

—Gary Shteyngart, author of
Super Sad True Love Story

“
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is dizzyingly brilliant. Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman who flies the banner of rum and candy and writes like a one-eyed feral bandit. His new book is supremely original, delirious, and synapse-shattering.”

—John Cusack

“
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
proves once again that Mark Leyner is a mad genius, one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes. The gods must be crazy for allowing him to write their collective biography. I want scrips for whatever drugs he’s taking.”

—Jay McInerney

“A madcap, profane, and sporadically enthralling postmodern myth of heaven and earth.”

—Ian Crouch,
Boston Globe

“Fifteen years after his last novel, cult author Mark Leyner returns with another blast of amped-up postmodern razzle-dazzle.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is about Ike Karton, an out-of-work butcher who’s manipulated by a host of all-powerful gods. Or maybe it’s about Ike
imagining
the gods, working through endless thought streams in some kind of deranged hall-of-mirrors inner monologue. Or it could be about one of the gods’ epic battle with the book itself, or…well, it’s complicated.
TSFN
is just brilliant enough to keep you from throwing it across the room.”

—Rob Brunner,
Entertainment Weekly

“This book did all kinds of things to my brain: squeezed it, shocked it, scrambled it, and, finally, improved it. There is no one like Mark Leyner in fiction today, and with
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
he has found—or invented—a language with which to render the insanity and self-
referentiality
of our contemporary culture. A chaotic and vibrant novel whose form is perfect for a chaotic and vibrant universe.”

—Charles Yu, author of
How to Live Safely in a
Science Fictional Universe

“Leyner’s first novel in fifteen years proves he is still a mad genius.…Writers like Joyce and Leyner make you see the world differently. Reading them is like walking through a hotel room with an ultraviolet lamp: you start to see linguistic corruption and defilement everywhere. Everything you read (and write) starts to sound like a Leynerian parody of itself.…
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is infinitely recursive. It subtends and engulfs everything around it, voraciously, until it contains the whole verbal universe, and
Nutsack
is all that’s left: infinitely hot, infinitely dense, horribly debased, and extremely funny.”

—Lev Grossman,
Time

“Long before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert grabbed the cudgel of irony to blast through our decaying national discourse, Leyner’s electrifying, exuberant fiction burst through all narrative conventions, alive to every moment, and seemed to promise a new way forward, savaging celebrity culture while reveling in the hallucinogenic clutter.…Leyner riffs like Ornette Coleman: intense, rhythmic, theatrical. His sentences are twisty and windy, packed with puns and consumer products and pop culture and self-consciousness, and any attempt to replicate the Pop-Tart and Katy Perry chorus sugar-rush fizz of his prose will only get the self-conscious part right.”

—Don Oldenburg,
USA Today

“Mark Leyner sends the novel form through the stratosphere with
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
.”

—Elissa Schappell,
Vanity Fair

“Strange and hilarious.”

—Matthew Perpetua,
Rolling Stone

“A total delight. Like tweaking out on a super-trippy crystal meth high, but without the crash of annihilating depression that normally follows. Not that I really know this for sure since I’ve never actually been high.”

—Todd Solondz, director of
Welcome to the Dollhouse,
Happiness, Storytelling,
and
Palindromes

“To read Mark Leyner’s
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is to have it etched on your brain with a sharp periodontal tool.”

—William Gibson

“Like all great books (the Bible,
The Boy Scout Handbook,
The Joy of Cooking
)
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
thrums with a sense of inevitability, as if it has existed since the beginning of time. And it has. Read it out loud to your children, to your lovers, to strangers on street corners, and watch them be transformed.”

—Nick Flynn, author of
Another Bullshit Night in
Suck City
and
The Ticking Is the Bomb

“A wild, psychedelic digression of a novel that brings chaos to order in such a way that the story turns into pure mind. Reading it is like roller-skating backward up a disintegrating spiral staircase composed of millions of fluttering small moths. Except that it’s also like a thousand other things, none of which—I guarantee it—you’ve ever known or experienced before.”

—Walter Kirn

“A strange and indescribable novel.…Intermittently miraculous and often hilarious. It is also, unlike Leyner’s previous
novels
, at times almost achingly sad.…I felt as if I had stumbled on something thrilling and illicit—a piece of literary samizdat.…His writing is funny—unabashedly, repeatedly, relentlessly. To this day, you can bring me ten contemporary novels with HILARIOUS! stamped all over their covers and I will show you ten pages of Leyner that are funnier than all of them combined.”

—Adam Sternbergh,
New York Times Magazine

“Leyner runs the reader down a ruthless treadmill. He is administering an endurance test of an endorphin overdose.”

—Troy Patterson,
Slate

“
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
shows that his writing hasn’t lost any of its irreverent, hallucinatory freshness.”

—Laurence Lowe,
Details

“
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
is fantastic. It’s volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I’ve read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It’s been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.”

—Douglas Coupland

“Every sentence reads like a DMT-induced hallucination, adding up to an anarchic masterpiece of vulgarity, total pandemonium, and cartoonish free association; it may indeed be the craziest book ever written and adventurous readers in search of a seriously batty, one-of-a-kind work of unhinged imagination need look no further. Leyner and Ike Karton are heroes befitting our overloaded age, blurry yesterdays, and fungible times ahead.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“In
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
Leyner not only makes his meta reasonable, he finally makes it feel fundamental. In an age of steroidal Internet, of reality TV that’s endlessly deriving itself—the question isn’t Snooki and JWoww’s new show, it’s the show after that—Leyner has his best material. He’s been waiting for this all along.…The effect is hypnotic yet dazzling: a closed circuit with endless textual trap doors.”

—Theo Schell-Lambert,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Mark Leyner is either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no
precedent
.…​Leyner wants to capture your gaze, or die
trying
.…​If anything, the novel has been slapped awake, reanimated as something lighter and stronger, in terms of sheer entertainment, forfeiting not one drop of originality and ambition. In Leyner’s hands, the novel is an underwear-soaking comedy device more refined, and chemically stronger, than pretty much any other method designed to send people to their knees, weeping with laughter.…Think of it as
Pale Fire
written by medically enhanced teenagers who’ve overdosed on smart drugs (while also mastering an arsenal of literary techniques).…Leyner writes with one eye on the critical wolves, tossing out proof of his considerable erudition and formal prowess and occasionally rendering a truly tender moment just to show you he knows how to do it. He demonstrates how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left behind, proving that fiction can be robust, provocative and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment.”

—Ben Marcus,
New York Times Book Review

“His latest novel,
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack,
sticks out like an infected, throbbing appendage compared with the
seemingly
endless crop of mopey, self-important, “serious” novels crowding the shelves of bookstores these days.…The epic is even stranger than it sounds, and we belly laughed throughout the weekend it took to devour it.”

—
Vice

“This stream-of-consciousness–laden gospel gradually reveals that the book itself is the eternal story of Ike Karton, a forty-eight-year-old anti-Semitic everyman from New Jersey.…There’s nothing quite like Leyner on a roll. Anyone who’s still with us by now should embrace this earnest exploitation of the myths of the new world, complete with celebrity cameos.”

—
Kirkus Reviews