Jeremy
Adam Levin is wry, and clever, and - perhaps most importantly - fun author. That is the easiest takeaway one can have upon completion of his thousand page debut novel, The Instructions. It is almost glaringly clever, buzzing neon signs of cleverness that leave afterimages floating behind your eyelids as you speed your way towards his next clever sentence, clever passage, clever chapter. In the context of The Instructions, this elevates the material rather well, it being the story of not just a singular gifted child, but a group of gifted children and their endless socratic debates over playground politics and religious zeaolatry.
The style fits the content, a pitch perfect recreation of that cloying way a precocious child will flaunt his rhetorical talents for your praise. I am all too familiar with it as a formerly state-recognized gifted child myself. However, this voice that Levin nails so well does tend to get grating in the back half of such a massive work, does tend to feel a little one-note at times. I really did struggle between pages 600 and 800 to decipher how many Gurion-isms were actually Levin-isms and whether I was being too charitable with my (to that point unchallenged) assumption that the whole of The Instructions was an excercise in a character with verbosity-as-avoidance syndrome. I do think Levin mostly sticks the landing in that regard, but for those lengthy passages where the book ceased to be as fun as I knew it could be, and instead seemed more trapped in its character's meandering proselytizing, I had to knock down my rating a bit.
I also don't really understand the comparisons with Infinite Jest. I know from reading one of his interviews that Levin would agree with me there. The Instructions is much more narrow in scope, much more focused in voice. It's really a one-mode work, which makes its ability to hold attention for over a thousand pages more impressive. The only comparison I'd really make between the two (other than their status as doorstoppers) is that the politics of both seem to have grown more vital and contemporary as they've aged, at least in my opinion.
Adam Levin is wry, and clever, and - perhaps most importantly - fun author. That is the easiest takeaway one can have upon completion of his thousand page debut novel, The Instructions. It is almost glaringly clever, buzzing neon signs of cleverness that leave afterimages floating behind your eyelids as you speed your way towards his next clever sentence, clever passage, clever chapter. In the context of The Instructions, this elevates the material rather well, it being the story of not just a singular gifted child, but a group of gifted children and their endless socratic debates over playground politics and religious zeaolatry.
The style fits the content, a pitch perfect recreation of that cloying way a precocious child will flaunt his rhetorical talents for your praise. I am all too familiar with it as a formerly state-recognized gifted child myself. However, this voice that Levin nails so well does tend to get grating in the back half of such a massive work, does tend to feel a little one-note at times. I really did struggle between pages 600 and 800 to decipher how many Gurion-isms were actually Levin-isms and whether I was being too charitable with my (to that point unchallenged) assumption that the whole of The Instructions was an excercise in a character with verbosity-as-avoidance syndrome. I do think Levin mostly sticks the landing in that regard, but for those lengthy passages where the book ceased to be as fun as I knew it could be, and instead seemed more trapped in its character's meandering proselytizing, I had to knock down my rating a bit.
I also don't really understand the comparisons with Infinite Jest. I know from reading one of his interviews that Levin would agree with me there. The Instructions is much more narrow in scope, much more focused in voice. It's really a one-mode work, which makes its ability to hold attention for over a thousand pages more impressive. The only comparison I'd really make between the two (other than their status as doorstoppers) is that the politics of both seem to have grown more vital and contemporary as they've aged, at least in my opinion.