San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Mark Leyner contemplates fathers, daughters and time
Twenty-five years ago when I arrived in New York, a friend born and raised there passed along a novel and two story collections written by Mark Leyner. He suggested the books were required reading for anyone new to the city, and they did, in fact, reflect its rush of stimuli on a newcomer. Leyner’s language was dense, his imagery visceral and his conveyance of ideas could induce a sort of reader’s whiplash. Sentimentality appeared to be in fairly short supply.
All these years later, Leyner, 64, has gone and written a novel about a father and a daughter. Lest Leyner’s legion grow concerned, “Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit,” finds its parent and child ethnographers in a spoken-word karaoke bar in the fictional nation of Chalazia while the scene outside the
Bar Pulpo is one of kaleidoscopic violence involving a criminal faction that splintered from a children’s theater. 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.
Leyner’s bar name was certainly not random. The bloodshed outside the bar is certainly pulpy. And as the Spanish word for “octopus,” the Bar Pulpo indicates the book’s intention of a singular entity with multiple tendrils operating in different directions to different ends.
Which is a long way of saying “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.
“It’s very much my alternative to the saccharine Hallmark card thing about fathers and daughters,” he says. He laughs: “It’s difficult to describe. I’m an insular, sometimes a bit out of control person. Then I have this daughter who’s not that way. And she’s the person who understands me almost better than anyone in the world. I don’t think my wife would object to me saying that at all. There are ways my daughter understands me that my wife doesn’t, that nobody does. That has been a plotline in crazy science fiction or horror movies. The daughter unafraid to go into the lab that no one else goes into. He’s doing horrible experiments, and she brings him a turkey sandwich and a Coke. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ ”
Leyner’s take on parenthood is refreshing for the ways it avoids so many tenured tales in songs and stories about fathers and daughters. His daughter is 27, so he’s long past the point of romanticizing any one aspect of their connection. Rather, he describes it almost as a loving time-travelogue: “Someone told me they think it’s the most authentically revealing of any book I’ve written,” Leyner says.
He pauses, suggesting he wants to dispute the assertion but can’t quite do it.
“It’s a profound and mind-boggling experience being a father of a daughter. The changes, the vicissitudes come in such acute ways. And I wanted to try to deal with that in the book,” he says. “When she was 9, I just had to walk into a room and there was complete adoration. She got older and made
friendships, and I realized I wasn’t the only game in town. And there was a period of mourning about the loss of that. But I remember a conversation with my own dad, and he said, it feels so prophetic, but he said, ‘She’ll become an adult, and you’re going to have a deep reciprocal friendship and you won’t believe how wonderful it is. And that’s what I wanted to convey in this book. The book is about this deeply gratifying connection.”
Emerging from this idea — a father and his grown daughter immersed in conversation — is a meditation on the passing of time. Leyner’s story gets into the ways people of differing ages experience events and time differently. He touches on how the future can feel “impossibly remote” in youth, only to find sharpness years later as mortality and death become less abstract as concepts.
Leyner set upon a perfect mechanism for this theme, having this story of a father and daughter and time recited by a patient viewing the narrative through a Phoroptor at an ophthalmologist’s ‘Last Orgy of the Divine
Hermit’ office. This part of the narrative serves as the frame, though breadth of the narrative in “Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit” doesn’t lend itself to easy description and is best experienced rather than recounted. Structurally, it comes across as a series of narrative circles that intersect in strange and compelling ways in settings both familiar (Waco) and fictional (Chalazia).
Leyner himself struggles to describe the structure, settling on a “Chinese box or Russian nesting doll type thing.”
Its pace, like much of his work, is brisk, with humor and horror placed in close proximity to one another. But one of the narrative circles within it is of a watchmaker, and clearly, that story resonates with Leyner. A meticulous approach is required to make stories so feverish.
Under a microscope, Leyner’s work reminds me of works by William Hogarth, the 18th-century English artist. Hogarth’s engravings share with Leyner’s fiction a sharp satirical tone. They’re also full of kinetic energy, despite being — like Leyner’s printed pages — black-and-white ink static on a canvas. Hogarth’s work was full of intricate markings, seemingly infinite little pieces that harmonize into a greater whole.
Leyner has found over 30 years that such painstaking work sometimes goes unnoticed.
“Even going back to my first book tours, I’d meet strangers who were frequently disappointed when they meet me,” he says. “They thought I’d be crazier. I’ve always thought I seem like a fairly nice guy, but they expected me to be deranged. But the work itself, it’s enormously painstaking to do this. It would be an impossibility for this to just flow straight from my mind to my fingers. I do want these to be the sorts of things that are read beginning to end, but this one was intricately plotted. And I’m proud of how it came out. I hope people enjoy it line by line. There are no transitional sections. It’s a meal, and the utensils and plates are meant to be edible, too. But this idea that my books are these creative vomited stream of consciousness ravings by a lunatic — I wish! I wish it were that easy.”
If anything, Leyner feels he’s unable to match the lunacy of our age. “I mean, reality far outpaces anything I write,” he says.
Yet he inadvertently wrote a novel that nestles comfortably into an era of confinement, in which his father and daughter are in an indoor space together while mayhem stirs outside.
“I think the relationship between the book and what is happening now is inevitable, but it was unintentional,” he says.
He and his wife have endured quarantine comfortably in New Jersey, and his daughter, who works in film, lives nearby in Brooklyn.
“We’ve all found ways to enjoy each other that weren’t there before,” he says. “And even before all this started happening, that was something I wanted to write about. That among the scatological humor and cartoonlike violence and the recklessness and rambunctiousness in the story are these real expressions of an emotional life, in this case expressions between me and my daughter.”