[In the review below, Kakutani finds the short stories included in Leyner's collection Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog to be "clever and amusing and willfully superficial."]

Reading Mark Leyner's new collection of short pieces [Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog] isn't like reading a book exactly. It's more like spending several hours with the Comedy Channel on cable television, or a long evening with a couple of teen-agers on acid. Imagine Beavis and Butt-head morphed with William S. Burroughs or Michael O'Donoghue crossed with Eugène Ionesco; then picture the twisted products of their imaginations projected on one of those big-screen television sets, with the volume turned all the way up. The results are intermittently hilarious, but also silly and highly sophomoric.

Essentially a collection of pieces Mr. Leyner wrote for assorted publications (including The New Yorker and The New Republic), Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog ostensibly addresses a variety of subjects like fatherhood, the Miss America pageant, muscleman culture, sperm banks and the Menendez brothers' trial, but each piece is really just an excuse for Mr. Leyner to joke around and free-associate about his favorite preoccupations: namely, arcane skin diseases, bizarre technological innovations and the consequences of contemporary celebrity.

As in his last book, Et Tu, Babe, Mr. Leyner purveys an image of himself as a willfully hip, ardently narcissistic dude with a cheerfully warped sense of humor. As he writes in the introduction, "I'm just the cream-soda-swilling, crotch-scratching, irascible, coughing-up-indigestible-bits-of-grizzle-from-some-meat-on-a-stick, surly, greasy overalls-over-candy-colored-latex-mini-kimono (my work uniform when I'm in the throes of a novel or a play), don't-bother-me-till-halftime kind of guy that society has made me."

In another piece, he writes: "Each morning and before I leave for any social function, I gargle with Johnny Walker Black. I think that women like that tinge of hard liquor on a man's breath in the middle of the day; it contributes to that aura of insouciant menace that the 90's woman finds so alluring and so refreshing after a decade of male angst."

Mr. Leyner's fictional alter ego and the other characters who appear in these pieces tend to speak the same idiosyncratic lingo of non sequiturs and hyperbole, trading wise-cracks and oddball observations with self-conscious panache.

In "Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown"—a playlet that's supposed to be a takeoff on Hawthorne's tale "Young Goodman Brown"—a rabbi speaks of meeting extraterrestrials in a sub-basement of Bergdorf Goodman, while Mr. Leyner's own fictional persona seriously contemplates paying $3,450 for a miniature Giorgio Armani backpack for his daughter's Barbie. In "The (Illustrated) Body Politic," senators cover themselves with arcane tattoos attesting to their power and connections. And in "Oh, Brother," a high-powered lawyer argues that twin brothers have murdered their sweet, nurturing parents because they had become convinced—through hours of television watching—that such pleasant parental behavior was highly abnormal.

The satiric impulse behind such stories, of course, involves simple exaggeration of an already bizarre reality, and a similar technique informs Mr. Leyner's manic depictions of a futuristic world filled with peculiar new services and products: miniaturized Barbie dolls that can clean out clogged-up arteries and perform other surgical procedures; post-cold-war clothes manufactured by defense-industry giants ("a single-breasted, three-button, linen-and-viscose-glen-plaid suit from McDonnell Douglas"; a "heather-gray cotton V-neck cardigan from Raytheon"); on-line posters whose "image changes according to which celebrity is most popular for your child's particular demographic niche," and self-service, drive-through liposuction clinics.

Highly attuned to the effluvia of contemporary pop culture, Mr. Leyner deliberately focuses on the glossy surface of life. Indeed, many of these pieces take as their theme America's obsession with image: "Hulk Couture" is a tongue-in-cheek ode to bodybuilders and their bulked-up physiques; "Immoral Allure" suggests that crime may not pay, but that it may lend its practitioners a glamorous beauty and allure, and "Dangerous Dads" gives new fathers tips on how to maintain a macho image.

But while some of these pieces are laugh-out-loud funny, they tend to have the emotional afterlife of a mayfly. In fact, in sending up our appearance-mad society. Mr. Leyner has consciously or unconsciously created pieces that echo the very culture he intends to spoof: pieces that are clever and amusing and willfully superficial.