The first thing that came to mind when thinking about how to describe My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is that it's nonsense in the same way as Jethro Tull's "Mother Goose". While Ian Anderson playfully sang "Then the chicken-fancier came to play --with his long red beard -- and his sister's weird - she drives a lorry", Mark Leyner writes sentences such as these:
Suddenly, the swinging doors burst open and a mesomorphic cyborg walks in and whips out a 35-lb. phallus made of corrosion-resistant nickel-base alloy and he begins to stroke it sullenly, his eyes half shut. It's got a metal-oxide membrane for absolute submicron filtration of petrochemical fluids. It can ejaculate herbicides, sulfuric acid, tar glue, you name it. At the end of the bar, a woman whose album-length poem about temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) had won a Grammy for best spoken word recording is gently slowly rubbing copper hexaflouroacetylacetone into her clitoris as she watches the hunk with the non-Euclidian features shoot a glob of dehydrogenated ethylbenzene 3,900 miles towards the Arctic archipelago, eventually raining down upon a fjord on Baffin Bay.
There are 17 chapters of this kind of stuff with some of them lacking punctuation. The book was published in 1990 although parts of it were seen earlier in various magazines and anthologies dating back to 1984. This is the era which saw the rise of MTV and CNN along with all the attendant doomsayers decrying the erosion of the attention span. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is something like a literary equivalent of a music video with its rapid-fire descriptions of events and people that are loosely connected, at best. Plus there are the obligatory pop culture references. Here we get the movie Yentl, director John Landis, and singer Dionne Warwick, amongst others.
If you're looking for plot, look elsewhere. The titular cousin appears a couple times as does a monorail but there's not much here to tie things together. There is no protagonist-antagonist relationship and events jump around so much that there is no time to setup a narrative. Most of the story, such as it is, is told in the first person by a nebulous and morphing narrator. One page the tale is seemingly told by a woman who describes getting pregnant but a page later the person references a boyhood friend.
Despite being essentially gibberish, there were times that I chuckled to myself. For example, in one chapter the narrator notes that he/she enrolled at the Wilford Academy of Beauty whose principals are "Teamwork; Positive Attitude; Hair That's Swinging and Bouncy, Not Plastered or Pinned Down; and Hair That's Clean, Shiny, and Well-Nourished." Attendees went on "tactical missions" with packs loaded with "poncho, mess kit, C rations, canteen, first-aid kit, compass, lean-to, entrenching tool, rinse, conditioner, setting lotion, two brushes (natural bristle and nylon), two sets of rollers (sponge and electric), barrettes, bobby pins, plastic-coated rubber bands, and a standard-issue 1,500-watt blow dryer." There is also some interesting wordplay such as when the narrator describes a series of statements by other people with "she said sullenly" several times before the last one which gets "she said suddenly".
However clever and interesting My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is stylistically, I just couldn't appreciate it. If there had been a narrative thread to ground the proceedings or if perhaps the events didn't go off on tangents so quickly, I might have enjoyed it. Hell, one chapter would have been alright. But 150 pages was trying. There were funny parts but not enough of them to capture my attention or interest.
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