The Sugar Frosted NutsackA Novel

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised.

For a certain subset of readers, call them the proto-bloggers, the long wait for The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has felt excruciating. It’s was the mid ’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.

In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher, but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.

In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.