[In the following review of Et Tu, Babe, Frumkes discusses what he considers instances of "unrelenting megalomania, narcissism and disjointed narrative flow" in Leyner's novel.]

Just as Finnegans Wake is one long swim that begins (in medias res), "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay," and ends 628 pages later, "A way a lone a last a loved a long the," suggesting the cyclical nature of life and death, Et Tu, Babe is one long paean to its author, Mark Leyner, a self-promotional concert that begins, "Dear Peter Guzzardi [his editor], As you know, I am not your average author," and ends 169 pages later with "Call 1-800-T-LEYNER today for an exhortatory message from Mark Leyner to his fans recorded in the heroic hours before his disappearance! Stay on the line to record your personal words of support for the man whom food-and-lifestyle authority Martha Stewart has described as having 'the face of an angel and the glands of a god!'… Help disseminate the incendiary words of this visionary warrior by ordering additional copies of Mark Leyner's majestic masterworks for your family, friends and co-workers," suggesting that Mr. Leyner … how shall I say it?… has probably already made some preliminary advances toward self-reflections in a pool.

Nevertheless, Mr. Leyner, whose previous books are I Smell Esther Williams and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, is not without talent or undroll in his contemporary Joycean, Hunter Thompson-on-who-knows-what, stream-of-consciousness sort of way. If you are prepared to put up with the unrelenting megalomania, narcissism and disjointed narrative flow in this novelistic pastiche of pop-cultural images, sci-medical terminology and cosmoscatologica, you will be treated to some genuinely creative and amusing writing, as when Mr. Leyner satirizes the biotech craze: "Phallotropin—if I'm not mistaken—is a patented form of synthetic penile growth hormone (PGH). The drug was originally developed as an otological drop to facilitate ear wax removal. Then, a number of men who inadvertently ingested the solution orally began to notice significant penile growth…. I also know that the writer Mark Leyner has supposedly signed a multimillion-dollar contract to be the spokesperson for Phallotropin."

Mr. Leyner can be perverse without being pornographic, erotic in an almost surreal way: "Then one of them—I think it was Felice—puts my face into her freshly shaven armpit, which smells slightly but deliciously of teenybopper b. o. and she says 'count backwards from 100' and the next thing I remember is waking up and it's Rosh Hashanah, U.S.A., in the 1990's."

He can also be delightfully inventive: "Later on in the afternoon, we took a couple of bottles of scotch up to the rooftop patio and we played this drinking game that Mark invented. You listen to one of those talk-radio stations and every time you hear the word 'the' or 'and' you have to take a drink." And by the book's end he even has Katarina Witt (c'mon, Mark, not Katarina too), the beautiful Olympic skater, fantasizing about him after his purported disappearance: "I recently competed in the World Figure Skating Championships in Stuttgart. It was the climax of my program, I was doing a triple Salchow and, right in the middle, in midair, I just left my body and there I was with Mark again—this was during the most important international competition of the year! Well, it turns out that, in my disembodied state, I didn't do a triple Salchow, I did a septuagesimal Salchow—that's 70 rotations in the air!"

The truth is, Mark Leyner, despite all the ego, displays not just one jeu d'esprit in Et Tu, Babe, he displays 70. I'm not surprised that several members of the press, according to the jacket copy, have dubbed him "the cult author of the 1990's." Mr. Leyner is a very funny man who has written a very twisted book.