[Kowinski is an American book reviewer. In the following review of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Kowinski praises Leyner's prose style and hails the author as "a voice to watch in the nineties."]

Fiction readers as well as writers watch for what that smarmy public relations type in "A Hard Day's Night" called "an early clue to the new direction." In these particularly perilous times, we're on the lookout for new styles and substances that can help us sort out where we've been and where we're going, as a society and as individuals. Besides which, the novel form requires a certain amount of novelty to keep going and continue growing.

Mark Leyner has been touted as the largest antidote to American minimalism—or as some would describe it, the Wimp Lit—that's dominated the literary field of dreams and launched a thousand gleaming paperback originals. There's no doubt that Leyner is different. In [the pages of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist], worlds and words collide, and deep soul searches are likely to be interrupted by a commercial for hemorrhoid cream; in other words, the surrealism of real life today.

It's not that Leyner's prose is unprecedented—in fact, it's his mixtures that are original. He's a hybrid of William Burroughs and Dave Barry, Henry Miller gene-spliced to Woody Allen. This is the fiction of colliding sound bites, of a dream life spent zapping through a reality totally composed of cable TV channels, genre paperbacks, National Geographic, pornography, and medical instrument catalogs.

Aside from the specific content of Leyner's wildness—and you can quote from any page at random:

An enormous Caucasian fat man in plaid Bermuda shorts spraying Windex on the front windshield of a Datsun 280-Z with a Playboy rabbit dangling from the rearview mirror gets a cramp and calls out, Grandma! Grandma!

What's great about this prose is that it works for readers. After promising starts in the sixties—Bob Dylan, Ronald Sukenick—there's been an imaginative slumber in advancing this kind of high-stepping, hijinking, very American surrealism. Everybody thought this should work: a constant assault of images simultaneously mundane and mind-boggling, grafted onto mutated pop fiction and media forms. It seldom has, but now Leyner pulls it off. There's enough punch and surprise in the prose for the moment-to-moment success that nontraditional narrative needs to hold us, even long enough to sense the poetic structures of these individual pieces. At last readable literature has been made from the peculiar material of contemporary life, the stuff other fiction leaves out.

With this book, Leyner becomes a voice to watch in the nineties. He may even be a new type of writer.