[Kakutani is a regular reviewer for New York Times. In the following mixed review of Et Tu, Babe, she praises its inventiveness and irreverence but faults the book's satirical density or "anecdote overload."]

Who is Mark Leyner? According to the fictional testimonies offered in his cheerfully warped new novel, he is "the most intense, and in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America." Stephen Hawking supposedly didn't publish A Brief History of Time until Leyner had "reviewed the book's fundamental theorem" and given his approval. Martha Stewart supposedly hailed him as "the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people flocking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good." And Harold Pinter supposedly called Leyner's play Varicose Moon "achingly beautiful": "I think it will be unnecessary for playwrights to write any new plays for some time now: Varicose Moon should suffice. In fact, I think it would be vulgar for playwrights to burden the public with their offerings given the creation of this coruscating masterwork." The fictional Leyner says of himself:

I'm only 36 years old; I've achieved international notoriety as a best-selling author, body builder, martial artist; I make more in a year from product endorsements than most people make in a lifetime; I've got a multi-million-dollar headquarters with a guard tower, gatehouses, patrol dogs, armed sentries, a vast warren of underground tunnels; I've got a gorgeous wife and an entourage of gofers and sycophants.

This description, of course, is both a sendup of America's celebrity-obsessed culture and a fantasy self-portrait of the real-life Mark Leyner, a 36-year-old writer who achieved college cult fame with his last novel, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990). The fictional Leyner depicted in the pages of Et Tu, Babe is a monster of egotism, a show biz-literary tycoon of formidable wealth, a Rabelaisian consumer of drugs, women and bizarre experiences, a paranoid and possibly dangerous eccentric pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Beautiful women—including Sonia Braga, Elle Macpherson, Claudia Schiffer and Katerina Witt—sing the praises of his remarkably muscled body, while less famous fans line up to buy coffee-table books featuring photos of him in the nude. There are Leyner dolls in the toy stores, and Leyner cartoons on TV. The television show "The American Sportsman" asks Leyner—as well as Ken Follett and Whitley Strieber—to go to Australia to hunt bandicoots with aboriginal boomerangs, and Bergdorf's charges $3,500 for a hand-carved Baccarat crystal bottle of Team Leyner perfume.

Who is this fictional Mark Leyner? Picture Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson, Keith Moon, Donald Trump and Howard Hughes all rolled into one. Picture Citizen Kane, the Terminator and the character played by Mick Jagger in "Performance" merged into a single person.

And what of the narrative style used by Mr. Leyner to depict his fictional alter ego? It, too, is a crazy hybrid: William S. Burroughs crossed with Michael O'Donoghue, Jack Kerouac crossed with Sam Kinison. Told in short, discontinuous takes, the story of the fictional Mark Leyner is a long shaggy-dog tale, packed with scatological digressions, ribald fantasies, Dali-esque dream sequences, and weird bits of manically distorted information.

The reader learns of such bizarre phenomena as weight-loss camps for terrorists; penile-growth hormones; medical cheese sculptures (sculptures of human organs, made of mozzarella and havarti), interactive computerized laser-video players that insert Mr. Schwarzenegger as the actor in any movie ("The Diary of Anne Frank with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Anne Frank, West Side Story with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Tony, It's a Wonderful Life with Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of Jimmy Stewart") and "visceral tattoos," that is, tattoos inscribed on people's internal organs with radioactive isotopes.

In the course of Et Tu, Babe, the fictional Leyner begins to run amok. He starts kidnapping his promising writing students, to insure that they won't one day become a threat to him, and he steals a vial of Abraham Lincoln's breath from the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The F.B.I. starts moving in on him, and his paranoia turns to justified fear.

For the reader, his adventures make for a dizzying read, by turns funny, outrageous and sophomorically twisted. But while Et Tu, Babe attests to Mr. Leyner's vitality as a writer—his inventiveness, irreverence and shrewd ability to satirize the wretched excesses of a society obsessed with fame—a little bit goes a very long way. Because the narrative is so crammed with anecdotes, jokes and grotes-queries, the effect is similar to sitting on a Disneyland ride several times. Or spending several hours with a garrulous and narcissistic dinner guest who's cranked up on Benzedrine and high on his own ego. One begins this demented book amused and entertained and finishes it reeling from anecdote overload and more than a little sick of the author's willful hipness.