Gone With the Mind
Mark Leyner
[Little, Brown and Company]
Mark Leyner is often hailed as a prescient harbinger of the digital age and of Googlish sensibilities. Since the early 1990s, his postmodern prose has looped and manically hyperlinked back to itself, leaped gleefully from topic to topic and bathetically bashed together eclectic cultural phenomena. In this vein, Gone With the Mind riffs on Mussolini, shooter video games, Jenna Jameson, TED talks, Shakespeare, folktales, Candy Crush and more, all in the service of producing an autobiography that makes glorious (non-)sense of Leyner’s life. The book is presented as a series of comments by the author and his mother intended to open a reading of Mark’s “real” autobiography at the Food Court Reading Series at the mall, a two-person vaudeville show hammily delivered to two bored food court employees. The autobiography is stalled by these digressions and the reading never comes – the waiting is the novel; the deferral the life story.
And yet, Leyner resists the mantle of internet apologist, noting that the “efficacy” of search engine culture “is the mortal enemy of my style”. He rails against the digitised “petite bourgeoisie ideology” that has hacked our minds, our bodies, and that most intimate territory of our relationship with ourselves. Gone with the Mind engagingly chronicles Leyner’s relation with others – primarily his mother – but its greatest achievement comes through its ludic paean to the writer’s own imaginative consciousness, to the mind left free to roam and wander off. This fictionalised Leyner cultivates a relationship with his fictionalised mindspace – and with his reliable Imaginary Intern – that is wildly inventive, grudgingly tender and seriously hilarious. On a sentence-level, it’s a joy. Sure, it’s overdetermined narcissism of the highest order, the gags sometimes get knowingly old and Leyner seems determined to poke, prod and push the reader to the limits of her patience, but this book flagrantly revels in its own juvenilia, marginalia and finally in its own vision of being. “Life is super-trippy”, it tells us, and the more mind-trips we take, the more life there is.
Words: Gill Moore
