SOURCE: "Welcome to the '90s," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, January-February, 1991, p. 20.

Kowinski is an American book reviewer. In the following review of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Kowinski praises Leyner's prose style and hails the author as "a voice to watch in the nineties."

Fiction readers as well as writers watch for what that smarmy public relations type in "A Hard Day's Night" called "an early clue to the new direction." In these particularly perilous times, we're on the lookout for new styles and substances that can help us sort out where we've been and where we're going, as a society and as individuals. Besides which, the novel form requires a certain amount of novelty to keep going and continue growing.

Mark Leyner has been touted as the largest antidote to American minimalism—or as some would describe it, the Wimp Lit—that's dominated the literary...