Book Review: 'The Tetherballs of Bougainville'

The plot of this book follows a New Jersey student/champion tetherball player whose father is about to be executed for shooting a security guard who caught him shoplifting an ice cream scooper... aw, forget it. You don't read Leyner for the plot. The plot's just there so he has a place to hang his hilarious, postmodern prose poetry — a mixture of pop-culture references, brand names, scientific mumbo jumbo, and zeitgeist-skewering satire. In this latest novel, the author of Et Tu, Babe writes about the Miracle Collar — a push-up device to enlarge men's Adam's apples; the erotic possibilities of Frank Stella paintings; a star-studded Ebola benefit; and, of course, the primal appeal of tetherball. A-