The Big Man on Campus : If MTV were a book, it’d be Mark Leyner’s ‘Et Tu.’ It’s written in manic student-speak.

Mark Leyner is posing stiffly but mirthfully in a casement window of the Chateau Marmont lobby. His gut is sucked in, proof positive that the poser in question is “the best-built comic novelist in America,” as he likes to be known. A wee skull dangles from his neck.

Leyner’s smile widens as he peers out at all the landscaped nothingness, and a photographer records his cheer for posterity.

“I feel like a woman in an Egoiste commercial,” he preens, seeming very much the chic shill for a Chanel fragrance.

If that sounds like just so much pomp and pop culture, then it figures: It’s the formula for Leyner’s latest pop maelstrom of a novel, “Et Tu, Babe.”

Leyner’s latest is the author’s paean to his own celebrity-in-the-making after the flurry of success two years ago for his campus-cultish “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.”

That manic volume of surreal prose poetry offered cameo appearances from the Pope’s valet de chambre and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl--not to mention such unlikely inventions as Le Corbusier-designed jeans and the fearfully sexually over-mature Joey D., who at 4 1/2 revved a tricycle with a turbocharged V-8 engine.

Back at the Chateau Marmont, the scenario about to be played out is like a self-fulfilled prophesy: Leyner, 36, will be interviewed about his latest book, which satirically dissects--and bizarrely overstates--the machinery of his burgeoning fame. And the interview will, in turn, do its own bit to boost Leyner’s profile.

It’s the hall-of-mirrors approach to hype, which lately got a major goose from the official imprimatur of the literati: a cover story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Leyner lugs it with him from hotel room to hotel room like a Gideon Bible on the go.

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley was particularly acid about Leyner’s debut in “that august journal,” sniffing, “Mark Leyner, it seems, is joining--or being co-opted into--the Establishment.” Yardley nonetheless mirrored the magazine’s esteem, praising Leyner’s “high-risk, off-the-wall performance.”

The spotlight has led to the predictable round of parties, ironically with some of the same Big Names from pop culture that permeate “Et Tu.” The august Martha Stewart, who is gently lampooned as a great admirer of Leyner’s musculature, now really and truly shows up on his arm at various New York events. (They met through their publisher.)

Leyner is regarded as the Writer for the MTV Generation, the spiritual stepson of William Burroughs and Lenny Bruce, only with a high-tech sheen. Cozy references to Bret and Tama trip easily off his tongue.

Which is pretty much what “Et Tu” is about.

“Et Tu” presents Mark’s World after he has turned into the pop cultural equivalent of the giant orchestrated wizard face in the penultimate Oz scene. He commands the forces of his entourage, Team Leyner, and such a wellspring of charisma that Claudia Schiffer shivers at the mention of his mole.

He barrels into a variety of motley sorts, like Flo, the Jane Goodall chimpanzee, who’s flying in to appear on “Nightline” to protest Burger Hut’s new line of fried monkey bits, “Rhesus Pieces.”

“Et Tu” reads like remote-control zaps, compulsively littered with curious cultural collisions and references from television, classical literature, science and the language of doctors and corporate marketing executives.

Leyner says he kinda saw all the media hoohah coming, that it was built into the book, like a subliminal message to the press.

“I was trying to write a relentlessly entertaining book, but I knew that because it was about the apparatus that makes a person a celebrity, the media would be fascinated because it’s about them too. So it seemed natural to me that the book would get a tremendous amount of attention.”

Sound a bit calculating? How about this? Not entirely by accident, the media were tagging Leyner as a college cult author before he actually was a college cult author.

Leyner kinda saw that coming too.

“The cult was manufactured,” he says, perched stiffly on the tippy tippy edge of a couch at the Chateau Marmont. “I’m touted as something I say satirically in (“Et Tu”). Actually, Martha Stewart says that about me supposedly. She’s describing how wonderful my body is and she says something like, ‘It’s hard to imagine this as the body of a writer, never mind an acclaimed writer who brought a generation of young people flocking back to bookstores who had purportedly given up literature for good.’

“Then I actually see people saying that in reviews.”

“My Cousin” had reportedly sold about 18,000 copies before “Et Tu” came out, and the domino effect of later-book publicity has since increased that number to 25,000. Those are healthy sales, but is it exactly flocking ?

“Of course not,” Leyner says cheerfully. “There’s not a thing in ‘Et Tu, Babe’ that is said by that narrator that isn’t vastly warped. Everything the narrator sees and smells and touches is some tool of his own promotion or self-aggrandizement. It’s what makes the book so funny, because this character just will not let up. Isn’t that to some degree how celebrity is manufactured now?”

So is Leyner about marketing or literature, manipulation or cerebration? Both. His work is about manipulation and it is manipulation. “Et Tu” is an overweening overstatement of his writer’s ego--and a spot-on portrait of his own unspeakable desires.

“I’m kidding but I’m not kidding,” he says, “I’m kidding in the hyperbolic version of this, in the extremity of those fantasies. But if you scale them all back, it’s a very honest work of art. It’s an honest book about having my mole removed from my right eyebrow . . .”

Which a rabid 16-year-old fan from Terre Haute wins in a lottery so she can receive a Leyner mole transplant with the help of Christiaan Barnard. . . .

“. . . or the separation from my wife . . .”

Who calls to say she has tied herself to the tracks and the Bullet Train is coming. . . .

“. . . or my dog Carmella. . . .”

Who writes her own tell-all book, “Megalomania’s Mascot: My Life With the Team Leyner Cult.”

“If you can flense away all the comedy,” Leyner says, “you’ll find just a regular old diary of the year, in a certain way.” Maybe in a juiced-up, zillion-references-per-second kind of way, which is particularly tasty to the television-coddled generation that did snap up Leyner’s novels, after all.

Leyner knows they did, in part, because his Hoboken, N.J., phone number is printed amid a blizzard of sentence bits in “My Cousin.” Students call him from Princeton and Brown to say they get high and read his books to each other at Leyner parties.

Not that he saw that coming when he wrote “My Cousin.”

“I didn’t calculate the audience,” Leyner says. “The calculation I have when I’m writing a book is to be as entertaining as possible and to have as wide-ranging a miscellany of stuff in there. There’s enough contemporary pop culture language that one could say this is really going to appeal to people who watch MTV.

“One can make a parallel between the form of my books, that they move very quickly from anomaly to anomaly, that that’s somehow what MTV’s style is. But that’s really the style of television commercials.”

He knows a lot about television commercials and the art of pitchery from his abandoned day job writing about artificial saliva and incontinence briefs for a medical advertising agency.

But the real source of his form wasn’t the pop culture cacophony as much as it was his fascination with poetry, although the two dovetail nicely. Leyner began writing poetry in high school in New Jersey and then blended it into his fiction at Brandeis University. His first book was a still rather obscure collection of short pieces titled “I Smell Esther Williams.”

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the kind of fiction that was as dense with imagery and dense with excitement and pleasure as poetry is, and have a kind of fiction that didn’t have all kinds of dumb transitional pages where you’re getting people off a plane to a hotel?’ ”

But all that denseness can be dizzying, and Leyner’s crazed style can irritate some critics. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani griped that reading “Et Tu” was like “spending several hours with a garrulous and narcissistic dinner guest who’s cranked up on Benzedrine and high on his own ego.”

Leyner is unmoved.

“Some people say, ‘Enough already about this Mark Leyner,’ but what’s so funny about the book is that the guy will not stop. He’s relentless. So if you don’t accept that basic premise, you’re not going to really enjoy this book. It’s sort of like getting into a pool after a huge meal and complaining that the pool gave you a stomachache. Well, don’t go in, then.”

But if Leyner ruled the world, the pool would get as crowded as his fiction.

“I want college people to like my books, but when I’m writing, I want to feel like Kim Il Sung in North Korea. I want to feel like every sentence of mine is being piped into everyone’s home everywhere. That’s the delusion of grandeur that every writer has--but few will admit to.”