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Résumé
Résumé
The blazingly inventive fictional autobiography of Mark Leyner, one of America's "rare, true original voices" (Gary Shteyngart).
Dizzyingly brilliant, raucously funny, and painfully honest, Gone with the Mind is the story of Mark Leyner's life, told as only Mark Leyner can tell it. In this utterly unconventional novel -- or is it a memoir? -- Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a New Jersey shopping mall.
The "audience" consists of Mark's mother and some stray Panda Express employees, who ask a handful of questions. The action takes place entirely at the food court, but the territory covered in these pages has no bounds. A joyride of autobiography, cultural critique, DIY philosophy, biopolitics, video games, demagoguery, and the most intimate confessions, Gone with the Mind is both a soulful reckoning with mortality and the tender story of the relationship between a complicated mother and an even more complicated son.
At once nostalgic and acidic, deeply humane, and completely surreal, Gone with the Mind is a work of pure, hilarious genius.
Critiques (3)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Leyner (The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) applies his trademark brand of absurd, postmodern metafiction to this interesting autobiographical novel. The fictional Mark Leyner in this book is giving a reading of his new autobiography in the food court of a mall. His mom introduces him, occupying the first 40 pages of the book with a few random stories of his childhood, before letting him speak. The audience, made up of a Panda Express worker and a Sbarro employee on their break, doesn't pay attention at all. Leyner proceeds to explain how the concept of his autobiography evolved from a first-person shooter video game to its current form, with the help of an imaginary intern. The intern serves at points as both his collaborator and his interlocutor in imagined conversations, urging him to work on the autobiography. Throughout his philosophical musings and nonlinear childhood stories, he never really gets around to a traditional autobiography, but he does paint a loving portrait of his mother and recounts a wrenching battle with prostate cancer. The q&a session after the reading is a transcript of a conversation with his mother in a bathroom stall at the mall. Though it's whimsical and unconventional, this is probably Leyner's most mature work. There is plenty of sincere storytelling throughout, and Leyner's masterly ability to interlace humor with existential dilemmas makes for a compelling novel, autobiographical or not. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Kirkus
Things have been positively normal around here for a while; it must be time for another dose of Leyner (The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, 2012, etc.). "Before I start, I'd like to say: Fuck everyone who said I was too paradoxical a hybrid of arrogant narcissism and vulnerable navet to succeed in life (even though they were right)" writes Leyner to set the stage. So begins the alleged autobiography of the author Kirkus once dubbed "the poet laureate of the MTV generation." If The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1997) was about Leyner's father, this is an affectionate if honest love letter to his mother, Muriel. Not that the gravity of family drama stops Leyner from going full-on meta with a nesting-doll scenario of such surreal dimensions that there's no doubt it's really him. First of all, it's not even a straight-up autobiography. It's a novel about Leyner performing a reading of his autobiography in the food court of the Woodcreek Plaza Mall along with his mother, a few fast-food dronesand absolutely no other audience. After an introduction by his mother, Leyner explains the origin of Gone with the Mind, which started as an autobiography in the form of a first-person shooter that begins when the author is assassinated or commits suicide. His ghost must then travel backward in time undoing the events of his life. "The, uhthe goal of the game is to successfully reach my mother's womb, in which I attempt to unravel or unzip my father's and mother's DNA in the zygote, which will free me of having to eternally repeat this life." His mother's reaction? "It almost seems like overkill to me." Despite the hyperstylized self-satire at work here, there's a sweet story to be had for those who appreciate the author's singularly outlandish wit. It's pointless trying to classify or summarize Leyner's work. By now readers who get it are prepared to buy the ticket and take the ride. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du New York Review of Books
AN ABSURDIST AUTOBIOGRAPHY is either a contradiction in terms or a redundancy, depending on how you look at it. Either the purpose of an autobiography is to make sense of the writer's life, in which case absurdity would be a severe impediment - or else life itself is absurd, and all autobiographies are too. In his new autobiographical novel, "Gone With the Mind," Mark Leyner seems to split the difference: He makes sense of his life by unpacking just how ridiculous it is to be alive. "Gone With the Mind" is a blindingly weird novel: a book-length stand-up routine in which a man free-associates about his life to a mostly empty room, mixing the philosophical and the scatological with abandon. At times, it seems to be an argument against autobiography, as well as a lament about the impossibility of actually communicating with an audience. But after Leyner gets done slicing the fictionalized version of his life into small and disconnected fragments, the slivers turn out to draw blood. The protagonist of "Gone With the Mind" is a frustrated author named Mark Leyner, theoretically reading from his autobiography in the empty food court of a mall deserted because of flash-flood warnings. The only audience members are his mother and two restaurant workers who insist they're not there to listen to Leyner - not that they have much choice. But instead of reading from his book, the fictional Leyner delivers 200-odd pages of remarks that circle endlessly and encapsulate what T.S. Eliot probably meant by "the boredom, the horror and the glory." The real-world Leyner is well known for playing such postmodern games in his books, though in "Gone With the Mind" he has knocked his fictional counterpart down a few pegs. In his acclaimed 1992 novel, "Et Tu, Babe," the protagonist is the famous novelist Mark Leyner, a Schwarzeneggerian Übermensch who lives in a lavish compound called Leyner H.Q. and is worshiped by a legion of fans called Team Leyner. And his follow-up novel, "The Tetherballs of Bougainville," features another hero named Mark Leyner, a prizewinning teenage screenwriter. Along with the fictional Leyner's new reduction of fortunes comes a narrowing of focus. Here there are no state-sanctioned assassins or nonagenarian cyborg bodyguards, not even the offbeat gods who starred in Leyner's previous novel, "The Sugar Frosted Nutsack." Instead, the narrator obsesses about the minutiae of his childhood, along with his recent prostate cancer and the resulting prostatectomy, his fetish for women's armpits, random things he saw on television. These details really become bizarre only when they're held up to the light, but they remain personal and occasionally poignant. The book's main surreal touch is the Imaginary Intern, a figure the fictional Leyner conjures from the pattern of cracks in a restroom's floor tiles. The Imaginary Intern serves as a kind of amanuensis as Leyner conceives his autobiography, which starts out as a first-person-shooter video game in which the player has to travel backward through Leyner's life, undoing each incident until at last Leyner is unraveled in his mother's womb. (Benito Mussolini, in a flying balcony, carries the player from scene to scene.) The autobiography, we are told, has mutated away from that initial concept, but we never really find out what it has become. If the book's running monologue seems aimless, this is completely intentional. The fictional Leyner keeps coming back to the idea that all narrative conventions, including anecdotes and vignettes, are debased and to be avoided; his hope, he says, is that "one could eradicate all the quaint handicraft synonymous with an autobiography." He occasionally cites a maxim coined by Japanese manga artists: "Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi," meaning, "No climax, no resolution, no meaning." But along with the main character's penchant for taking tiny details and magnifying them until they appear wildly silly, much of the energy in "Gone With the Mind" comes from his audience. The main character's mother, who arranged the food-court appearance, delivers a 40-page introduction before he speaks, and we're periodically reminded she's there listening to him, as he overshares about his childhood and occasionally insults her. Then there's the small Greek chorus of foodcourt workers, who are vexed to listen to this nonsense and appear to be a proxy for some real-life readers who might not appreciate the "Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" of it all. But if you learn to roll with the Tristram-Shandy-on-nondrowsy-cough-syrup circumlocution, "Gone With the Mind" may worm into your brain. Leyner makes the case fairly late in the book for a kind of meaning through randomness: In the same way that tarot cards, taken in a group, signify something, a burst of vivid, unconnected images can leave a powerful impression. When you strip away the conceit that it's a metafictional author presenting a nonexistent autobiography, and ignore the two workers from Sbarro and Panda Express, "Gone With the Mind" begins to seem more like a man speaking to his mother about his life. His fear of mortality in the wake of a cancer scare, joined to his obsessive reclamation of childhood, add up to a kind of Freudian desire to be reunited with his mother, who's right there listening to all this. As the narrator says at one point, the mother is the great hole in your life, and the more you fly away from her, the more you actually fly toward her. That insight is, like this book, truly absurd and absurdly true. A (fictional) autobiography that supposedly started as a first-person-shooter game. CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the editor in chief of the website io9 and the author of the novel "All the Birds in the Sky."
