"Narrative form is an ever malleable plaything in Leyner’s ostentatiously acrobatic new novel. . . . shamelessly funny."—Kirkus Reviews
"With Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, Mark Leyner — comic virtuoso, avant-garde literary tummler, trope-exploder extraordinaire — has outdone himself. After more than three decades, he remains the funniest and bravest of writers, not to mention the one least interested in stale conventions of fiction. We are lucky to have Leyner. Without his books to read, I probably would have enucleated my eyes with a melon-baller a long time ago."—Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask
“Like a neck realignment you didn’t know you needed, and didn’t even ask for, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit will leave you amazed, euphoric and stunned. Underneath the brilliant one-liners, wide-ranging satire and thrillingly violent slapstick set pieces, is a poignant story about a father’s love for his daughter, and his terror of losing the one person on earth who seems to vaguely understand him. Aggressively original, intensely inventive and extremely funny, Leyner’s new novel reminds me of why his books inspired me to start writing fiction in the first place. Stop being such a coward for once in your damn life and read Mark Leyner.”—Simon Rich, author of Hits & Misses
“As in most of Leyner’s novels, these little joke-bombs go off on nearly every page…a weirdly exciting reading experience. The serious work of this comedy is to depict a father’s love for his daughter and their shared recognition that they won’t always be together. It’s played out across a hall of mirrors, an 'infinite regress of fathers and daughters.' The situation arouses pathos, which Leyner acknowledges before relentlessly hyperbolizing, satirizing and detonating the pathos. The novel’s underlying poignancy, however, remains intact.”—Ken Kalfus, New York Times Book Review
“Sentimentality, it seems, can take many forms much like history, mythology and folklore. In this case it’s a little beacon in clouds of chaos. The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is of a piece with Leyner’s body of work, while also baring an underlying sweetness as the author recognizes and updates the trope of the mad scientist with the daughter.”—Houston Chronicle
"Exhilarating and grotesque."—Publishers Weekly
“Mark Leyner is one of the most inventive, receptive, and uproariously funny novelists working today. He’s also, somehow, one of the most compassionate. Sure, on its face, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is about two drunk anthropologists and their obsession with ultraviolent street soldiers. But it’s also a story of love and family, the comforts of ritual, and the sad mystery of death. Like a power ballad—beautiful because it’s unhinged—this novel should play on repeat, forever, in all the karaoke bars of the world.”—Dan Piepenbring, editor of The Beautiful Ones and coauthor of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
"I laughed myself silly. If you haven't read Mark Leyner, try this book!"—Nell Zink, author of Doxology
"All the trademarks of a typical Leyner bizarrerie are on display, from the high-flown language and po-mo hijinks to the endless pop culture references and comic non sequiturs. The weirdest . . . novel in an admirably weird career . . . what I respect most about Mr. Leyner: He’s the undisputed master of a style of writing he invented, whose rules no one else can really understand.” —Wall Street Journal
2020-10-27
Experimental storytelling keeps Leyner's latest novel whirling around.
Narrative form is an ever malleable plaything in Leyner’s ostentatiously acrobatic new novel. In the simplest possible terms, it’s about a decrepit old anthropologist and his daughter at work on a book about the Chalazian Mafia Faction. Much of the novel is written in the form of a play, in which a patient narrates the action from the words that appear on her optometrist’s eye chart. And so on. Bring a dictionary: The author delights in layering slabs of vocab onto the page (“In another version, the Father and Daughter (named Caesar and Little Madonna) are extinct, rodent-like mammals called multituberculates who’ve been kept in a cryostat for several years”). Folding in on itself in dizzying postmodern loops, setting up motifs and tweaking them in a jazzy frenzy, this is a book written by someone who knows how smart he is. It isn’t so much an invitation as a challenge—if you finish this novel and like it, you must be a being of superior ambition and intelligence. Either that or you have a very high stake in your own literary endurance. Leyner delights in unusual, world-in-a-grain-of-sand narrative delivery; the action in his 2016 novel/memoir/all of the above, Gone With the Mind, takes place in a food court, where the character Mark Leyner holds forth and tells the story to his mom. On the one hand it’s exciting when a book blows narrative convention to smithereens. That said, you don’t read Leyner’s latest so much as you work at it, one allusion-packed page at a time. There’s no distinction between high and low culture here. One moment Leyner quotes a long passage from dance critic Jennifer Homans; a while later comes a riff on “Ryan Murphy’s limited series about a nasal, anorexic, handcuffed Momofuku Noodle Bar dishwasher’s festering toupee fetish.” Because, why not? This is ultimately the book’s saving grace: It is frequently, shamelessly funny enough to make the toil worthwhile.
Bring your vocabulary chops with you; you'll be needing them.
