The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Mark Leyner’s second novel, The Tetherballs of Bougainville, is less a novel than a free-form assemblage of surreal scenes, absurd dialogue and other narrative digressions. The book's plot loosely centers on a fictional thirteen-year-old (also named Mark Leyner), who is competing for an enormously valuable high school writing prize while his father sits in prison awaiting execution. When Mark's father survives three lethal injections, an obscure law (the New Jersey State Discretionary Execution) allows for his release from prison — but with a catch. The state of New Jersey can kill him at any point in the future in any way they desire: 

“I think I read about this in Elle,” Dad says. “It’s sort of like an optional fatwa.”

“The feature we like to stress to releasees is the indeterminacy,” continues the superintendent. “You're living your life, rowing merrily along, and suddenly one morning you wake up and there's a dwarf ninja crouched on your chest who deftly severs your carotid arteries with two honed throwing stars. Or you're on a flight to Orlando, Florida, giggling as you read the Confessions of Saint Augustine, and meanwhile, 35,000 feet below, a New Jersey state trooper steps out of his car, kneels alongside the shoulder of I-95, aims a shoulder-held antiaircraft missile launcher, and blows your 727 into friggin' curds and whey.”

“They’d do that?” I ask excitedly. “They’d sacrifice all those people just to kill my dad?”

“NJSDE gives us a lot of leeway. We’re no longer encumbered by the federal government, by the FDA, the FAA, the Justice Department… it really unties the hands of the state. I think it’s an extremely innovative piece of statutory legislation. And you have to give the Governor the bulk of the credit. She takes a lot of flak for the narcolepsy and the lathery horse posters, but she was committed to this and very savvy about the politics.”

“How do you feel about it?” my father asks, turning to the rabbi.

“It’s a very postmodern sentencing structure – random and capricious, the free-floating dread, each ensuing day as gaping abyss, the signifier hovering over the signified like the sword of Damocles. To have appropriated a pop-noir aesthetic and recontextualized it within the realm of jurisprudence is breathtakingly audacious. I think you’re going to find it a very disturbing, but a very fascinating and transformative way to live, Joel.”

The Tetherballs of Bougainville has a lot of witty and sometimes very funny passages like this one. However, the book doesn’t become much more than its individual scenes, and you arrive at the end of it with a certain emptiness, an unhappy sense that the whole thing was a put-on.