I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

I found the way the author played with text and time very interesting and innovative particularly with the two columns and how they merged to one from the point of view of someone undergoing an eye exam. Neat.

Published by Little, Brown and Company on January 19, 2021

The terms absurdist and surrealistic came to mind as I read Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit. The story is narrated by a patient as she reads the content of an eye chart during a visit to the optometrist. Neither the patient nor the doctor seems to think it strange that the eye chart — “the world’s greatest encrypted text” — spells out a hidden narrative. And a strange narrative it is that the eye chart tells.

The book is written like a play. Occasional stage directions appear in italics (“The PATIENT suddenly stops, flushed with curiosity about how the Professor’s Introduction could possibly include a reference to the OPTOMETRIST.”). Dialog follows the name or title of the speaking character.

The patient reads aloud the introduction to an ethnography titled Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit. The professor who wrote the introduction claims to be one of the few academics who has visited Chalazia. In the professor’s opinion, the ethnography was not written by the anthropologist to whom it is attributed but by his beautiful daughter Gaby, with whom the professor is in love. The professor deems the book to be a masterwork, “one of the great anthropological adventures in modern literature” and the “standard reference work on the Chalazian Mafia Faction” (CMF).

CMF street soldiers are former performers at the Chalazian Children’s Theater. Their weapons of choice are semiautomatic pistols and melon ballers. When they’re interviewed, they quote lines from musicals. Chalazia parallels but distorts American culture. Mark Leyner tosses in references to movies and actors and books and authors, sometimes altering them to suit his whims. There’s quite a bit of creative nonsense in the novel, all of it amusing.

The professor explains that the ethnography explores an enduring and evolving folktale about a dying father who wants to spare his daughter the pain of knowing that he will soon die. The second half of the book is an “epilog” that takes place in the Bar Pulpo as the CMF commits mayhem outside, splattering the bar’s window with the eyeballs of murder victims. Inside, getting drunk on gravy, the anthropologist and Gaby bond while surrounded by the text displayed on the bar’s spoken word karaoke screens. The anthropologist and his daughter are playing out their part in the folktale.

The story reminds the reader about the illusory distinction between perception and reality and how language affects the way we perceive. The words on the eye chart (or the patient’s perception of them) change as the optometrist tries a different lens, as if an entirely new story emerges when looking at the text with a different focus. In the novel’s second half, we learn that the same word in the Chalazian language can have different meanings depending on context. A particular two-word phrase in Chalazian means “a little,” but it can also mean “injection-site redness” and “YA fiction.”

We also learn that Bar Pulpo is filled with cosplaying fathers and daughters. The book could be read as a celebration of “a father’s exquisite love of his daughter” (it includes a long list of celebrity fathers of celebrity daughters). The novel is a little too goofy to be touching, despite its homage to father-daughter relationships. A reader might want to plumb its depths for hidden meaning, but I would need to give it a second reading to get past the silliness. Fans of offbeat humor won’t require more than one reading to be satisfied with Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit.

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Tender Bizarro; Metabsurd (my newly invented word)

I think you have to experience Mark Leyner on your own; no one can really capture one of his books in a review. But I'm willing to take a shot.

Think of an author like William S. Burroughs, but make him more coherent, funnier, kinder, more erudite, and less drug addled. Add a metafictional style and an absurd buffet of ideas, images, references, literary sparks, and throwaway lines and odd bits of business. Slip in a setup rather than an actual plot. That's more or less what you get here.

But here's the neat part. The book isn't just random, showy, writerly fun and games, although that's how it looks at first. Hidden behind all the fun and games is an earnest and rather tender and insightful celebration of the love of a daughter for her father, and his love of her. You have to tease that bit out because it hides behind all of the absurdity and sprawling storytelling, but there it is. It's funny, it's exhilarating, it's true.

So, leave postmodernist in the rearview mirror. This is the real stuff.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)