SOURCE: "Who Is Mark Leyner? A Legend in His Own Mind," in The New York Times, October 13, 1992, p. C17.

Kakutani is a regular reviewer for New York Times. In the following mixed review of Et Tu, Babe, she praises its inventiveness and irreverence but faults the book's satirical density or "anecdote overload."

Who is Mark Leyner? According to the fictional testimonies offered in his cheerfully warped new novel, he is "the most intense, and in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer in America." Stephen Hawking supposedly didn't publish A Brief History of Time until Leyner had "reviewed the book's fundamental theorem" and given his approval. Martha Stewart supposedly hailed him as "the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people flocking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good." And Harold Pinter supposedly called Leyner's play Varicose Moon "achingly beautiful...