Team Leyner

 Did Mark Leyner predict the future? His defiantly unique and uproariously funny 1992 novel, Et Tu, Babe, was received at the time of publication as an outrageously over-the-top send-up of celebrity narcissism, shot through with early-nineties cyberpunk aesthetics. Picking it up now, thirty years later, the book feels more like an eerily accurate evocation of the age we now live in. Leyner's ability to conjure our present world three decades in advance of actual history is apparent in instances ranging from the hyper-specific (the book features Justice Clarence Thomas in a brief cameo, defending himself from allegations of improper personal connections) to the more general: the book portrays an overall direction—a precipitous downward slide—of cultural and technological development that has since been fulfilled in our time. A few examples follow.

Leyner's technique is largely grounded in the art of the absurd juxtaposition. This prompts him to imagine such ludicrous future technologies in his novel as software that re-edits any film of one's choice so as to substitute Arnold Schwarzenegger for the lead actor, or—along similar lines—a computer program that will alter the text of Leyner's own books in order to make their contents uniquely relevant to each regional market in the U.S.—thereby maximizing the books' salability and profitability. And as preposterous as these pseudo-technologies must have sounded at the time, neither is completely beyond the reach of present-day generative AI. And neither seems especially far-fetched in an era when people are spawning deepfakes of politicians and Hollywood actors, and digital publications can rapidly generate personally-customized content instantaneously, using chatbots. 

The book also seems to presage the era of Trump. Indeed, the Donald himself appears once in the book, in a reference to the Marla Maples scandal, though he is here deployed in the book as merely one more of the perhaps hundreds of celebrity names and pop culture references that are thrown into Leyner's blender of postmodern bricolage. The Trumpiest character in the novel, then, is not Trump himself so much as Leyner, the author (as here self-mockingly portrayed). The book's central metafictional conceit, after all, is that it is a first-person narrative by Mark Leyner about Mark Leyner, devoted exclusively to the subject of the epic awesomeness of Mark Leyner. In real life, Leyner is a semi-obscure novelist who wrote for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s short-lived publication George and developed a cult following as a postmodern humorist. But here, in the book, Leyner is captaining a more literal cult of personality. 

The satirical version of Leyner in the novel is a paragon of narcissistic personality disorder and megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur taken to the utmost extreme. He lives on a compound surrounded by barbed wire and an entourage of devoted lackeys he dubs "Team Leyner" (someone ought to develop and market on Etsy, by the way, a real-life version of the embossed Team Leyner belt that Leyner describes as merch). He is so thin-skinned that he resorts to kidnapping students in his creative writing seminars who claim to write as well as he does, and subjects them to a process of thought reform until they once again affirm his unsurpassable genius. In terror of receiving a negative notice, he threatens prominent book critics, such as Michiko Kakutani, with retaliation if they fail to adequately praise his work (in real life, for what it's worth, Kakutani did review Et Tu, Babe, and found the book funny up to a point but ultimately wearying). 

But the Trumpiest thing about the Leyner character (as ironically portrayed in the novel)—even beyond the desire to slap his own name on everything in tall letters, defraud trusting fans, and surround himself with sycophants—is the threat his megalomania ultimately poses to the American constitutional order and the rule of law. He casually violates federal statute in one scene by breaking into government property and stealing a priceless "bio-historical" artifact (specifically, "Lincoln's Morning Breath"), and then, when federal agents foreseeably arrive at his compound and try to arrest him for it, he regards this as a matter of outrageous government overreach and political persecution (shades here of Trump's response to the Mar-a-Lago raid). He warns the agents that if anything should happen to him during the course of his apprehension, "There'd be riots I'm every major city in the country." And indeed, when he ultimately disappears—apparently to go on the lam—his cult-followers do in fact revolt against U.S. institutions worldwide and besiege U.S. embassies. 

The books ends with a fundraising plea to support Team Leyner that seems to presage the hyperbolic, apocalyptic and wounded tone of Trump's most fraudulent 2020 missives to his followers about the so-called "Stop the Steal" effort, or his later fundraising messages that have exploited his multiple indictments to drum up support from followers by portraying himself as the victim of persecution —"YOU can be a vital link in the Team Leyner chain of solidarity," says a fictional Leyner fundraising mailer that closes out the book. "The Punitive Confiscation Act is an outrageous attempt by the federal government to squash Team Leyner, persecute its leader, and drive him into the arms of his enemies."

The book, in short, is a dead-on and pitch-perfect parody of the way in which the narcissism of a celebrity can turn from a mere desperate need for praise and adulation, at first, into an increasingly dangerous and dictatorial paranoid desire to crush the opposition, through amassing a cult-like following with the power to seek revenge on one's behalf and persecute one's enemies. All of this perhaps seemed like comedic excess in 1992. Now it just seems to describe with literal accuracy the career of our previous president. 

And this is all before we even discuss the Clarence Thomas cameo mentioned above. The book, coming on the heels of the contentious 1991 confirmation hearings of the Supreme Court justice, features Thomas in one scene facing a similar congressional grilling, except this time it is on the topic of his ties to Mark Leyner himself. "On a number of occasions," the justice confesses, "on the way home from the Supreme Court, I stopped in at Team Leyner Headquarters for a Coke or Bud Light, but it was no matter of great import." Does this not sound exactly like the type of scandal, regarding his personal connections to controversial figures and major right-wing donors, that has followed the justice up to the present? 

Did Mark Leyner, that is to say—writing in 1992—manage to foresee—on top of everything else—Harlan Crow?