SOURCE: "The Same Pink as Pepto-Bismol," in American Book Review, Vol. 12, No. 5, November-December, 1990, pp. 16, 21.

Everman is an American writer and educator. In the following review of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, he cites numerous references to popular culture in Leyner's fiction, theorizing on the relationship between the act of writing and contemporary electronic mass media.

Reading the pieces in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is like sitting in front of an ultrahightech video monitor and flipping back and forth through the channels, from this to that to this and back to that again. It's all here and all perfectly familiar—the quiz shows, the kiddie shows, the late movies, the news broadcasts, the talk shows, MTV, and of course the commercials. The monitor flickers like a strobe light, and it's up to the viewer to put the bits and pieces together, to make a program of what he...