You'll Flip

By John Skow

TITLE: ET TU, BABE

AUTHOR: MARK LEYNER

PUBLISHER: HARMONY; 168 PAGES; $17

THE BOTTOM LINE: Channel surfing reaches the printed page, with a hyperactive eruption of "Huh, whazzat?" humor.

YOU WOULDN'T CALL MARK Leyner's latest comic train wreck a great read, but it sure is a helluva flip. In fact, reading in the stodgy, outdated sense of paging slowly and attentively through a book isn't how you interface with Leyner's hyperactive folderol. His stuff is a product rushed to the shelves to fill a marketing need: selling books to people who, a generation of hotshot young editors earnestly believes, won't and probably can't pay attention to more than 200 consecutive words. Since Leyner's attention span appears to be about 210 words, or three-quarters of a page, before an abrupt and fathomless change of topic, he easily outlasts his channel-surfing fans, who can flip through his pages making up coherence to please themselves, or, as Et Tu, Babe's author does, ignoring it altogether.

And it sure is quotable. Any sentence can be wrenched out to produce the "Huh, whazzat?" reaction so cherished by reviewers. Let's try page 102: "And the tranquillity of the summer evening is shattered by another ten- minute nonstop barrage of projectile vomiting from the fifth-floor suite of the opulent Casa Grundy." Well, not all experiments corroborate the speed of light. Another: "I hated the other children . . . My incisors grew four to five inches a year: if I'd stopped gnawing, my lower incisors would have eventually grown until they pushed up into my brain, killing me."

What is new and brilliant about this novel is its hard-edged irrelevance. It's possible that you might find the projectile-vomiting sentence in, perhaps, the 43rd chapter of Moby Dick. You never can tell. But if you did, Melville would have justified it. Leyner just spouts.