Funny, incisive self-portrait
Leyner’s Gone with the Mind is a discursive look into the nature, impossibility of autobiography
There’s one in every crowd: they’re usually the smartest person in the group, and the funniest, using humour to both emphasize and downplay their intelligence. They’re a pleasure to be around. Most of the time. Sometimes, though, the jokes go on too long. The monologue stops being funny. You see this, deliberately, in the work of some standup comedians: Louis CK, for example, will play out a joke-line too far, laughter dissolving into pauses of thoughtful discomfort. By design.
One of the most intelligent and hilarious writers of our postmodern age, Mark Leyner has spent his career pressed up against that point where humour becomes frustrating, where just enough becomes too much. In his latest book, Gone with the Mind, he has made it into a strength.
The idea of Leyner writing a straight memoir is almost incomprehensible, but rest assured: despite the claims, Gone with the Mind is not a memoir.
Rather, the novel takes the form of a reading from said memoir. Muriel Leyner, Mark’s mother, is the co-ordinator of a reading series in a shopping mall food court, and she has arranged for Mark to appear.
Muriel’s over-the-top, 40-page introduction gives us the first hint that something is awry, though it establishes the historical particulars for Leyner’s memoir, and offers glimpses into the nature of their relationship.
Not long after Mark takes the stage himself, though, most readers will realize that there isn’t going to be any reading from the autobiography: the introduction to the phantom volume is the book itself.
Initially jarring, once readers are in on the joke any sense of expectation can be set aside, and the book takes on a unique force.
Gone with the Mind is a sprawling, discursive, elliptical examination of the nature and impossibility of autobiography, an often-contradictory reconstruction of memory.
It is smart and clever (at times too much so), frequently funny and oddly touching. Mark’s relationship with his mother, and with his Imaginary Intern, take on a strange, unexpected pathos and immediacy, an emotional directness wonderfully at odds with the deliberate obfuscation of the book as a whole.
Gone with the Mind isn’t any sort of traditional read and it demands much on the part of its readers. It also handsomely rewards those who meet its demands. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.