A complete waste of time .Punishingly repetitive. ( )

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has the distinction of being as close to "metafiction" in a pure sense as one is likely to ever get, with recursive fractal curlicues redoubling constantly such that, as with some poetry, you can anticipate entire stanzas, but also constantly filling in more detail, as in discussions of Mandelbrot and the infinitely long coastline of Great Britain.

But there is also a heart at the center, suggesting that the closest movie analogue is actually Mulholland Drive rather something much more obvious at first glance, like Detention.

Or, to put it another way, as it moves from a story of a character struggling to be an individual, and heroic in his own way, to the story of everybody trying to frame that story, it lends heroism to that character simply by dint of his being the center of the constantly re-framed story. Does that make sense?

Further, it references this by offering that some have postulated that that character has, in fact, been a statue the entire time, thus auto-critiquing its own narrative point and structure.

And it has all of the wacky Leyner hijinx his other fiction does: too many pop-culture references to count, a genuinely astounding vocabulary and breadth of knowledge that seems almost wasteful, and astonishing imagination matched with descriptions that manage to convey visual imagery pretty much unmatched anywhere else.

As with everything that is so successful a deconstruction, though, it ends up empty except for the experience. ( )

A pantheon of hungover deities roll into the universe on a bus playing something that sounds a lot like the Mister Softee jingle, take residence in Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and turn their collective gaze on Ike Karton, a 48-year-old, 5'7", unemployed, Jersey City butcher.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is exactly the sort of next novel you might expect from Mark Leyner, in that Mark Leyner's indescribable, hyper-experimental, postmodern fiction generally defies the notion of expectation. If you expect however that it's hilarious, you wont't be disappointed. ( )

*****PLEASE NOTE THAT I WON THIS BOOK THROUGH GOODREADS FIRST READS PROGRAM****

This review was originally posted on Melissa's Midnight Musings: http://midnight-orchids.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-sugar-frosted-nutsack-by-mar...

One of the most bizarre, utterly ridiculous books I've ever read.


I don't even know how to begin this review. First off, let me tell you that this book is one of the most ridiculous, pointless things I have ever read.

The first thirty pages talk over and over about various gods who are in charge of random things, like chicken tenders and fibromyalgia, and who are all in some sort of weird lust competition with each other. Honestly, I don't know why I even kept going beyond the first 30 pages.

As you read, you learn about XOXO another god, who secretly is trying to sabotage this whole epic story, by inscribing on your brain whatever it is that he wants you to know. (Where the epic of it is, I honestly don't know. I'm not being snide or snarky here either, it's just the fact that this 'story' makes no sense.)

The story then gets into the background of Ike Karton, a strange man from New Jersey, who already knows that he's going to be assassinated in a week's time by some secret militant group.

Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this. It resembles the ramblings of a highly schizophrenic person. If not that then another way I could describe it would be to say that maybe it's someone on a bad acid trip or something. The main character Ike, smokes highly potent gravy, (not a code word for drugs here, it's actually described as normal brown gravy) throughout the book, so the bad trip theory is at least feasible.


I don't know if the author was trying to be somehow philosophical or deep with all of this mumbo jumbo and these random references, and just failed miserably, or if it was just supposed to be funny. Also a big fail there, by the way.

It's described in weird fits and starts that really make no sense and seem to have no real connection to each other. There's A LOT of name dropping, particularly famous name dropping. There's probably well over 100 famous people mentioned. Since Ike has a list of celebrities that he hates, maybe this is the authors personal celebrity dislike list?

The fact that the book is so repetitive really made me want to bang my head against the wall. I put this down several times because I just couldn't take the nonsense. I would give you an example, but I don't even want to open this book and read any of it again, it's that strange. Just trust me when I say it'll give you a headache.


One of the definitions of insanity is : a foolish or senseless, action, statement, policy, etc. Let me tell you this book is full of insane statements. Some people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In this case it would be reading the same thing over and over and expecting something different to happen the next time you read it. Maybe that means I'm insane for reading this book, I don't know.


This book only made me laugh once. And the joke wasn't even all that funny. I won't ruin it, but I will tell you that it has to do with Dick Van Dyke.


At this point you're probably wondering why I even finished the book. For one, I hate not finishing books. For another thing, I was really hoping this book would redeem itself somehow. Maybe there would be some deeper meaning, some lesson to be taken away from it. (If there was one, I didn't find it.)


Plus, I'd never read anything by Mark Leyner before, and I heard he's really funny. But, I guess his sense of humor is the kind that you "just get" or you don't. It appears that I'm in the "don't get it" group. I might try another one of his books at some point in the future but that won't be anytime soon.


That's what I get for picking the books with the quirky titles I guess.


I'd recommend this to anyone who's looking for a challenge, or who might like a lot of random name dropping in their books. Just a warning to anyone who might read this, there's some language that might be offensive and a lot of sexual references.
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bad. really bad experimental meta-fiction. I couldn't stomach more than the first quarter. ( )