ceoln reviewed The Tetherballs of Bougainville by Mark Leyner
Review of 'The Tetherballs of Bougainville' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Eh
At first I thought, ha, classic Leyner, this is great! (I loved I Smell Esther Williams, and especially My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.) Then after a bit I thought, well, it's maybe too much classic Leyner, and he's sort of just doing the same things again. And then I thought, eh, this is classic Leyner but without the parts that made it good.
And then it kept going for far too long.
Sure, it's extremely meta, and sure it is full of fanservice to the snickering 7th grader in all of us, and of cultural references that can be interpreted as ironically or otherwise as one feels moved at the time. But that's not enough. It doesn't have the humor that I associate with Leyner, or the wit. Just the sort of empty "of course I don't mean all of this" of a postmodernism that's forgotten why it bothered in …
Eh
At first I thought, ha, classic Leyner, this is great! (I loved I Smell Esther Williams, and especially My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.) Then after a bit I thought, well, it's maybe too much classic Leyner, and he's sort of just doing the same things again. And then I thought, eh, this is classic Leyner but without the parts that made it good.
And then it kept going for far too long.
Sure, it's extremely meta, and sure it is full of fanservice to the snickering 7th grader in all of us, and of cultural references that can be interpreted as ironically or otherwise as one feels moved at the time. But that's not enough. It doesn't have the humor that I associate with Leyner, or the wit. Just the sort of empty "of course I don't mean all of this" of a postmodernism that's forgotten why it bothered in the first place.
And have we all somehow agreed to overlook the fact that pretty much the entire book is nominally a sex scene between a 13 year old boy and a thirty-something woman? I mean, sure, it's neither a titillating nor a realistic sex scene, and the 13 year old boy is not at all a realistic 13 year old boy, but still. I had the impression that publishers still had a problem with this kind of thing.
Sadly not impressed.