DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711060621

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT

                                            LENGTH:   55 lines

SELF-INDULGENT NOVEL PROVES TOO TIRESOME IN THE END

THE TETHERBALLS OF BOUGAINVILLE

MARK LEYNER

Harmony. 240 pp. $22.

Mark Leyner has a following. Behold the Web pages created to praise his genius, the book of his collected magazine pieces, his reliably funny, popular column in Esquire.

Behold his past hardcovers, works such as Et Tu, Babe; I Smell Esther Williams and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, all beloved by some.

Behold all that, then try to follow The Tetherballs of Bougainville, the man's fifth novel.

Go ahead, try. I challenge you. And when you're done, maybe you'll tell me why it is that the redoubtably gifted Leyner might have felt compelled to embark on this project, save to win the dubious distinction of having written the oddest novel of the year.

The book takes its title from the largest of the Solomon Islands, a speck of land on which, according to Leyner, the schoolyard game of tetherball enjoys worshipful popularity and its stars are treated as demigods.

Actually, though, tetherball has precious little to do with the story - if there's a story here - except that the pastime is also embraced by the book's protagonist, a 14-year-old named Mark Leyner whose murderer father is to be executed by the state of New Jersey.

Mark has a lot on his mind: Besides his dad's imminent demise, he faces a deadline on a screenplay he hasn't yet started, but for which he's already been chosen as the winner of a lucrative writing contest for students at a local junior high school.

And there's so much to do before he can get to the library to write the screenplay: witness his dad's botched execution, have sex with the penitentiary's warden, consume vast quantities of alcohol and drugs, and read aloud - while the warden takes a post-coital shower - a critical review of his work, as he hopes it might appear if he were to write the screenplay and thereby win the prize and become famous.

In other words, this is a movie review within a screenplay within a novel about a pubescent boy fretting over the need to write said screenplay.

This concentric construction is interesting, sure enough, and there are some funny twists and asides tossed into the whirl - quite a few of them, in fact. But the journey to the last page becomes tiresome, after a while, the tone too slapstick, the whole exercise way too self-indulgent.

Tetherballs winds up a severe test of the adage that getting there is half the fun: Once you arrive at the end, the getting is all you've gotten, and you haven't gotten much.

Genius, alas, has been squandered. Mankind has not been served.

And you're out 22 bucks. MEMO: Earl Swift is a staff writer.

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