MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST
In my continuing series of Books for Bigots, Mark Leyner's MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST is the next suggested title for those of professed bigotry. Other than the fact that it is a difficult book: I had to read it twice to try to come to some understanding of it and have probably failed. Other than clearly written by a person with a considerable vocabulary and a large store of literary references, I am still not settled on a category.
Clearly, any bigot would be appalled after the first few pages and would find it extremely difficult not only to follow it, since it can't be followed in the normal manner, and with subject matter that will appear on almost every page to be profane, vulgar, sexual, and in most others manners extremely upsetting to bigotry. There is something in it for all bigots to be pissed about. It is as if it were met specifically to annoy and will certainly be banned even though there is not one representation of actual coitus.
I see that several references call the work "postmodern". Most references I see of it online consider it a positive treatment of something or other such as "Every sentence is a stand alone short story . . ." or "a bunch of weird stream of consciousness shorts that don't quite go together . . . ". I don't see much positive in the book, but am willing to give it a chance to be banned or burned with the best of them.
The book is incoherent and appears to be purposely so. It is a Jackson Pollock painting. It has no flow, nothing linear. It is a complication of references and events with no connection. Simply by having a sentence containing his cousin the gastroenterologist here and there throughout the book does not render it coherent; it has no sense of a story or stories or snippets of personality; it is simply a jumble of random thoughts and references most of which may reflect the postmodern human being (at least to the mind of our author). Most bigots want coherence and words they understand. They will get neither from MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTROLOGIST.
The book will be banned and burned on two bases: one it has language unacceptable to bigots and two, it is beyond their comprehension. When a work is not understood, bigotry is at its finest. We don't understand it, ergo ban it and burn it. Be done with it and do not allow our children access to something that actually takes work and effort to understand; life's too short for that sort of thing.
This series of Books for Bigots has an inherent contradiction: They are books that bigots ought to read and they are books that will be banned and burned by any serious bigot. As with many things in life, a significant contradiction exists between what should be done with the book and what will be done with the book.
Richard E H Phelps II
Mingo
