Mark Leyner's Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog: a book review

¶ … Mark Leyner

Hey-I know this looks long, but it's about 1200 words without the two long quotations from the book.

So it's actually the right length according to the assignment, but you might want to mention that to the instructor.

A selection from Mark Leyner's 1995 work Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog is included by the editors of the Norton Anthology Postmodern American Fiction, although Leyner himself claims in a note in the anthology that his "work isn't animated by a desire to be experimental or post-modernist or aesthetically subversive or even 'innovative' -- it is animated by a desire to craft a kind of writing that is at every single moment exhilarating for the reader, where each phrase, each sentence is an event." (Geyh, Leebron, & Levy 242). As a result the entirety of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog holds up as a kind of aesthetic whole based purely on Leyner's stylistic exuberance. But reading the whole of this book is nonetheless an odd experience: it is not a coherent novel, but rather a collection of shorter pieces, the longest of which (taking up about eighty pages of the 234 pages of the book's total) is actually a stage drama. However I think a closer examination of the pieces that make up Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog -- with specific attention paid to this longest opening piece, entitled "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown" -- will demonstrate that Mark Leyner is indeed engaged in some of the most salient artistic techniques of the postmodern enterprise.

To begin, however, it is necessary to get an overview of the pieces collected in Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog. A number of these have been published before as stand-alone pieces, and a note at the beginning of the book acknowledges prior publication in such venues as Esquire, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and even, somewhat incongruously, The New York Times op-ed page (for a piece entitled "The (Illustrated) Body Politic," in which Leyner's satirical targets are more obviously politically charged). The longest piece, "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown," is stated as having been given a performance at London's Almeida Theatre, which indicates that it is intended to be seen as an actual stageworthy drama. But despite the occasional nod in the direction of recognizable genre, overall Leyner is engaged in writing a sort of bizarre prose-poetry which dispenses with many of the recognizable mechanisms of actual fiction. For a start, the chief characters running through all the pieces in the book -- including "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown" -- are Mark Leyner himself, and to a certain extent his wife Merci Pinto Leyner. Some of the pieces here ("Just Happy to See You, Chula," "Bassinet Mattress Day," "Thoughts While Listening to Mahler in the Afternoon") are best described as surrealist prose poems, written in strophes and often addressed to Merci, but without any recognizable plot. But in the longer pieces about "Mark Leyner" it is clear that this is not remotely autobiographical writing, as Leyner variously depicts himself as engaged in hardcore bodybuilding ("Hulk Couture"), writing epic poetry ("The Making of 'Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog'"), and going on a date with Diana Princess of Wales ("My Di"). In each of these cases, the linguistic excess of Leyner's self-representation is the real point, as we can see in the opening of "Hulk Couture":