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Bubblegum
The astonishing new novel by the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of The Instructions.
Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the Internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology--a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio--has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.
At age thirty-eight, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn't entirely sure are in his head. After Belt's father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears, as well as his estranged childhood friend Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.
Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the Internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology--a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio--has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.
At age thirty-eight, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn't entirely sure are in his head. After Belt's father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears, as well as his estranged childhood friend Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.
784 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 14, 2020
187 people are currently reading
7716 people want to read
About the author
Adam Levin
19 books450 followersAdam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, was published in late 2010. His stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Esquire. Winner of the 2003 Tin House/Summer Literary Seminars Fiction Contest and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, Levin holds an MA in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His collection of short stories, Hot Pink, was published by McSweeney’s in 2011. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches writing at Columbia College and The School of the Art Institute.
Authorial Influences and Inspirations: Adam Novy, George Saunders, Leslie Lockett, Stanley Elkin, Christian TeBordo, Rebecca Curtis, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Salvador Plascencia, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, and Katherine Dunn
Authorial Influences and Inspirations: Adam Novy, George Saunders, Leslie Lockett, Stanley Elkin, Christian TeBordo, Rebecca Curtis, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Salvador Plascencia, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, and Katherine Dunn
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 199 reviews
December 19, 2020
Oh my god oh my god oh my god please lord give me 800 pages of Adam Levin this is the only way I will make it through this fuckin quarantine with my brain even remotely intact pleeeeeeeeease.
September 25, 2019
One of the quirkiest protagonists I've ever run into. "Belt Magnet" as he is called has a psychotic disorder, but despite hearing voices from inanimate objects, being incompetent at managing his own affairs, and dependent upon his father although he is already 38 years old, most of his observations of himself and the world around him seem spot on—and hilarious. He has severe logorrhea, as do several other characters in the book although it is difficult to tell if they really do or that is just how he describes them. The book is a fictional memoir. I found myself laughing out loud, even when I was reading it in public places. It's pure entertainment!
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September 30, 2022Video on Adam Levin's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvAgG...
April 13, 2020
My review for the Chicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...
Postmodern novelist Mark Leyner once said in an interview that, “I don’t know that I consciously try to duplicate an American citizen’s apprehension of the information glut. But I’ve thought for the past couple of years that most writing doesn’t hold a candle to the exhilaration of just being alive and media conscious.” He made this claim back in 1992. Arguably, with the apotheosis of smartphones and social media, Leyner’s statement — if one finds it true — has only grown to be more acute.
In “Bubblegum,” his 784-page whopper of a second novel, Adam Levin uses every fictional and metafictional whistle and bell imaginable in his attempt to create a reading experience that not only holds a candle to but out-dazzles the exhilaration to which Leyner refers. In a high-concept twist, he does so by crafting a fictional present-day world in which the internet never happened.
Instead, his non-neurotypical protagonist — the 38-year old Belt Magnet, a little-known novelist who still lives at home with his widowed dad in the “greater Chicagolandarea” community of “Wheelatine” — inhabits an alternate contemporary America in which the interactive technology of preference and addiction is “a flesh-and-bone-robot that thinks it’s your friend.”
These creatures, known as Curios, or “cures” for short, have become every bit as ubiquitous as iPhones in our world, but Belt is among the earliest of all possible early adopters. Because of a psychological disorder that causes him to be able to communicate with inanimate objects — or “inans” as he calls them — Belt engages in a rash of “swingset murders” as a child, episodes in which he destroys — at the objects’ request — those pieces of playground equipment, often in front of cheering throngs of his classmates. Subsequently, Belt’s (soon-to-be-dead-from-cancer) mother enrolls him in a study at the University of Chicago for those “ages fifteen and under who’d been diagnosed with psychotic disorders” to participate in research “involving therapy animals.” Thus does Belt become the recipient of one of the world’s first ever cures, one which he and his mom name — based on the delightful noise it makes when it sneezes — “Kablankey,” who goes by “Blank” for short.
At first, this elaborate set-up is one that may involve the reader’s intellect more than their emotions, but once he has the time — and page count — to get his hooks in place, Levin’s story becomes, at some points, as funny, sad, compelling and exhilarating as anything on the internet or IRL.
A caveat, though, about the patience needed to give the narrative a chance to establish its magic: With so many books and so little time, one can understand the need for such standards as celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50. “If you’re fifty years old or younger,” she recommends, “give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it or giving up,” adding that if you’re over 50, you should subtract your age from 100 and use that as your guide.
Sound advice, but this reader would propose a different and considerably extended metric for long books, probably closer to a Rule of 100. For the first 90 pages — which sounds like a lot — the temptation to quit reading “Bubblegum” was powerful; the writing seemed simultaneously tiresome yet too clever by half, like it was straining hard and achieving very little. There are the Pynchon-esque names, like “Jonny ‘Jonboat’ Pellmore-Jason,” Belt’s youthful frenemy, and the bank teller who “had to be at least twice the recommended weight” whose name turns out to be “Lotta Hogg,” not to mention the seemingly pointless digressions, such as the one on the physical act of drinking which begins, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve taken a certain misguided delight in the tilting of partly filled vessels” and goes on for several paragraphs.
But upon this reader’s powering through, Levin’s book took hold, paradoxically in a passage in which Belt contemplates boredom. “My boredoms always seemed to strike me out of nowhere; they lacked salient causes, which made them hard to cure,” he observes. “My first impulse when bored was to play with Blank, yet since my boredoms, by nature, felt like personal failures — failures, that is, to be not-bored — and since feelings of failure could rapidly lead to feelings of frustration, and feelings of frustration increased muscular tension … I feared that if I, while bored, were to play with Blank, I would do so too aggressively, and possibly harm it, so I’d keep Blank sleeved whenever I was bored.”
From there on in, Levin unspools a story that dramatizes thinking to an extent that thought itself becomes as riveting as plot, but in which there’s also actual plot in abundance.
Almost excessively adorable, these tiny animal-esque machines, sometimes referred to as “Botimals,” require body-heat to survive and are programmed to adapt to their owners’ every whim. Cures live almost exclusively to connect with and amuse their masters, a directive that leads to many ethical quandaries and opportunities for abuse. In fact, the Curios are cute, super-cute, exceedingly cute, so cute that an owner can overload on their cuteness, meaning they ultimately end up murdering the cure, an indulgence which repulses Belt, but is commonly accepted practice in his milieu.
Levin’s debut novel, “The Instructions,” published in 2010 by McSweeney’s, was even longer than “Bubblegum” at 1,026 pages, and well received. Levin won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; he also was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Levin, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, grew up in Buffalo Grove and Highland Park. He draws on his experience of both the city and the suburbs to give texture to “Bubblegum,” as when he writes of Belt’s visit to the Pellmore-Jason compound that “most of the fields to the compound’s north had been transformed into Wyndstone Homes, phases I and II, and an unnamed strip mall dually anchored by a TGIFriday’s and a twelve-screen Cineplex Odeon Theater.”
One does sometimes wish that Levin could find it in himself to be more concise, and the book’s meta-memoiristic frame leads to some lengthy passages in the middle — especially such found documents as both the 1988 and 2012 “Graham&Swords” Botimal/Curio instructional brochures and “A Fistful of Fists: A Documentary Collage: the transcript of a film by Jonny Pellmore Jason Jr.” — that beg to be skipped or at the very least skimmed.
And on a couple of occasions — perhaps in an homage to Kurt Vonnegut, whose “Slaughterhouse-Five” he goes out of his way to imitate and reference — Levin inserts himself winkingly into the text. Near the end, for instance, Belt’s father writes a wordy letter to his son about meeting Levin at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, a letter that effusively praises both Levin and Levin’s real-life wife Camille Bordas for being extremely smart, attractive and funny writers; he notes how sad he is that he can’t buy his son Levin’s novel because “by the time I got to the front of the line, all the copies were sold out.” This kind of self-reflexivity is a hallmark of postmodern fiction, and individual readers will differ in regarding it as ingenious or simply cringe-inducing.
On the whole, “Bubblegum” manages to write about the internet and what the internet might be doing to us without writing about the internet. Belt refers to his own short story, “Certain Something,” as an “exercise in empathy,” and maybe “Bubblegum” is an attempt at an empathy ultra-marathon. Not every single moment of the experience feels great, but there’s an undeniable sense of accomplishment when one reaches the end.
Postmodern novelist Mark Leyner once said in an interview that, “I don’t know that I consciously try to duplicate an American citizen’s apprehension of the information glut. But I’ve thought for the past couple of years that most writing doesn’t hold a candle to the exhilaration of just being alive and media conscious.” He made this claim back in 1992. Arguably, with the apotheosis of smartphones and social media, Leyner’s statement — if one finds it true — has only grown to be more acute.
In “Bubblegum,” his 784-page whopper of a second novel, Adam Levin uses every fictional and metafictional whistle and bell imaginable in his attempt to create a reading experience that not only holds a candle to but out-dazzles the exhilaration to which Leyner refers. In a high-concept twist, he does so by crafting a fictional present-day world in which the internet never happened.
Instead, his non-neurotypical protagonist — the 38-year old Belt Magnet, a little-known novelist who still lives at home with his widowed dad in the “greater Chicagolandarea” community of “Wheelatine” — inhabits an alternate contemporary America in which the interactive technology of preference and addiction is “a flesh-and-bone-robot that thinks it’s your friend.”
These creatures, known as Curios, or “cures” for short, have become every bit as ubiquitous as iPhones in our world, but Belt is among the earliest of all possible early adopters. Because of a psychological disorder that causes him to be able to communicate with inanimate objects — or “inans” as he calls them — Belt engages in a rash of “swingset murders” as a child, episodes in which he destroys — at the objects’ request — those pieces of playground equipment, often in front of cheering throngs of his classmates. Subsequently, Belt’s (soon-to-be-dead-from-cancer) mother enrolls him in a study at the University of Chicago for those “ages fifteen and under who’d been diagnosed with psychotic disorders” to participate in research “involving therapy animals.” Thus does Belt become the recipient of one of the world’s first ever cures, one which he and his mom name — based on the delightful noise it makes when it sneezes — “Kablankey,” who goes by “Blank” for short.
At first, this elaborate set-up is one that may involve the reader’s intellect more than their emotions, but once he has the time — and page count — to get his hooks in place, Levin’s story becomes, at some points, as funny, sad, compelling and exhilarating as anything on the internet or IRL.
A caveat, though, about the patience needed to give the narrative a chance to establish its magic: With so many books and so little time, one can understand the need for such standards as celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50. “If you’re fifty years old or younger,” she recommends, “give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it or giving up,” adding that if you’re over 50, you should subtract your age from 100 and use that as your guide.
Sound advice, but this reader would propose a different and considerably extended metric for long books, probably closer to a Rule of 100. For the first 90 pages — which sounds like a lot — the temptation to quit reading “Bubblegum” was powerful; the writing seemed simultaneously tiresome yet too clever by half, like it was straining hard and achieving very little. There are the Pynchon-esque names, like “Jonny ‘Jonboat’ Pellmore-Jason,” Belt’s youthful frenemy, and the bank teller who “had to be at least twice the recommended weight” whose name turns out to be “Lotta Hogg,” not to mention the seemingly pointless digressions, such as the one on the physical act of drinking which begins, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve taken a certain misguided delight in the tilting of partly filled vessels” and goes on for several paragraphs.
But upon this reader’s powering through, Levin’s book took hold, paradoxically in a passage in which Belt contemplates boredom. “My boredoms always seemed to strike me out of nowhere; they lacked salient causes, which made them hard to cure,” he observes. “My first impulse when bored was to play with Blank, yet since my boredoms, by nature, felt like personal failures — failures, that is, to be not-bored — and since feelings of failure could rapidly lead to feelings of frustration, and feelings of frustration increased muscular tension … I feared that if I, while bored, were to play with Blank, I would do so too aggressively, and possibly harm it, so I’d keep Blank sleeved whenever I was bored.”
From there on in, Levin unspools a story that dramatizes thinking to an extent that thought itself becomes as riveting as plot, but in which there’s also actual plot in abundance.
Almost excessively adorable, these tiny animal-esque machines, sometimes referred to as “Botimals,” require body-heat to survive and are programmed to adapt to their owners’ every whim. Cures live almost exclusively to connect with and amuse their masters, a directive that leads to many ethical quandaries and opportunities for abuse. In fact, the Curios are cute, super-cute, exceedingly cute, so cute that an owner can overload on their cuteness, meaning they ultimately end up murdering the cure, an indulgence which repulses Belt, but is commonly accepted practice in his milieu.
Levin’s debut novel, “The Instructions,” published in 2010 by McSweeney’s, was even longer than “Bubblegum” at 1,026 pages, and well received. Levin won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; he also was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Levin, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, grew up in Buffalo Grove and Highland Park. He draws on his experience of both the city and the suburbs to give texture to “Bubblegum,” as when he writes of Belt’s visit to the Pellmore-Jason compound that “most of the fields to the compound’s north had been transformed into Wyndstone Homes, phases I and II, and an unnamed strip mall dually anchored by a TGIFriday’s and a twelve-screen Cineplex Odeon Theater.”
One does sometimes wish that Levin could find it in himself to be more concise, and the book’s meta-memoiristic frame leads to some lengthy passages in the middle — especially such found documents as both the 1988 and 2012 “Graham&Swords” Botimal/Curio instructional brochures and “A Fistful of Fists: A Documentary Collage: the transcript of a film by Jonny Pellmore Jason Jr.” — that beg to be skipped or at the very least skimmed.
And on a couple of occasions — perhaps in an homage to Kurt Vonnegut, whose “Slaughterhouse-Five” he goes out of his way to imitate and reference — Levin inserts himself winkingly into the text. Near the end, for instance, Belt’s father writes a wordy letter to his son about meeting Levin at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, a letter that effusively praises both Levin and Levin’s real-life wife Camille Bordas for being extremely smart, attractive and funny writers; he notes how sad he is that he can’t buy his son Levin’s novel because “by the time I got to the front of the line, all the copies were sold out.” This kind of self-reflexivity is a hallmark of postmodern fiction, and individual readers will differ in regarding it as ingenious or simply cringe-inducing.
On the whole, “Bubblegum” manages to write about the internet and what the internet might be doing to us without writing about the internet. Belt refers to his own short story, “Certain Something,” as an “exercise in empathy,” and maybe “Bubblegum” is an attempt at an empathy ultra-marathon. Not every single moment of the experience feels great, but there’s an undeniable sense of accomplishment when one reaches the end.
July 5, 2020
I feel a certain obligation to start this review by saying this book is definitely not for everyone. It is long, nearly 800 pages, with a style and structure that demands patience. The main character, Belt Magnet, suffers from a sort of psychosis that manifests itself not only in a (perhaps real, perhaps not) ability to communicate with inanimate objects, but in a deeply introspective personality that gives rise to long meandering sentences (often full paragraphs and pages) which his mother at one point describes as full of "asides and thoughts within thoughts". This will invariably repel readers who prefer clear, concise narratives. But I found this style to be charming, quirky, and immensely entertaining.
Patient readers who take to Levin's prose will find Bubblegum to be a book seething with style, loneliness, sentimentality, allegorical depth, and humor. The number of adjectives I can use to describe this novel is nearly as long as the novel itself: Creative, eccentric, witty, quirky, hilarious, sweet, thoughtful, smart, inventive, frustrating, confusing, distressing, emotional, and (endlessly) meandering.
The structure of the novel is in part novel/fictional memoir and partly a fictional manuscript of an academic (or artistic, I suppose) presentation which focuses on a type of robot pet called a Botimal, or a Curio.
The experiences we, the reader, have with Botimals, at times, deeply challenge the notion that they are robots (and are not in fact living, feeling, thinking beings) whose major function is to be unbearably cute—adorable to the point they overload humans senses to such levels that one cannot resist the urge to crush them, destroy them, or even consume them— by making us feel as though there may be a darker truth to their existence; that they might actually be living sentient beings. With that ambiguity in mind (perhaps even without it) there is a lot to be said about the grotesque treatment of these Botimals, which is seen at it's most extreme and nauseating fashion in the middle portion of the book (a scene-by-scene catalog of a documentary art film) and what that behavior says about human beings. Through these robot pets an alarmingly realistic quality of human behavior is put on display, namely: the way we normalize abhorrent behavior for the sake of pleasure and entertainment, the sadistic capacity of mankind, and the role of corporations in enabling these darker aspects of humanity in their amoral pursuit of money.
There's a lot more to be said about this novel, especially with relation to Belt's life, the very clear Vonnegut influences, and the very postmodern final pages. But I've likely already lost most of you due to the length of this review, so I'll end it here.
In short: I think l this is definitely a novel worth reading; you'll laugh, cry, be appalled, outraged, and potentially charmed by this quirky character's experiences.
Patient readers who take to Levin's prose will find Bubblegum to be a book seething with style, loneliness, sentimentality, allegorical depth, and humor. The number of adjectives I can use to describe this novel is nearly as long as the novel itself: Creative, eccentric, witty, quirky, hilarious, sweet, thoughtful, smart, inventive, frustrating, confusing, distressing, emotional, and (endlessly) meandering.
The structure of the novel is in part novel/fictional memoir and partly a fictional manuscript of an academic (or artistic, I suppose) presentation which focuses on a type of robot pet called a Botimal, or a Curio.
The experiences we, the reader, have with Botimals, at times, deeply challenge the notion that they are robots (and are not in fact living, feeling, thinking beings) whose major function is to be unbearably cute—adorable to the point they overload humans senses to such levels that one cannot resist the urge to crush them, destroy them, or even consume them— by making us feel as though there may be a darker truth to their existence; that they might actually be living sentient beings. With that ambiguity in mind (perhaps even without it) there is a lot to be said about the grotesque treatment of these Botimals, which is seen at it's most extreme and nauseating fashion in the middle portion of the book (a scene-by-scene catalog of a documentary art film) and what that behavior says about human beings. Through these robot pets an alarmingly realistic quality of human behavior is put on display, namely: the way we normalize abhorrent behavior for the sake of pleasure and entertainment, the sadistic capacity of mankind, and the role of corporations in enabling these darker aspects of humanity in their amoral pursuit of money.
There's a lot more to be said about this novel, especially with relation to Belt's life, the very clear Vonnegut influences, and the very postmodern final pages. But I've likely already lost most of you due to the length of this review, so I'll end it here.
In short: I think l this is definitely a novel worth reading; you'll laugh, cry, be appalled, outraged, and potentially charmed by this quirky character's experiences.
August 16, 2020
Brilliant work. A funny, melancholy, endearing, incredibly moving, clever and wonderfully written sprawl of a novel that will haunt me for years to come.
Levin has been one of my favorite writers since I read The Instructions, his massive and brilliant and massively brilliant debut novel, nearly a decade ago. I’m overjoyed to report that Bubblegum only further solidifies my high opinion of his talent.
Highly recommended. Not a book for everybody, but definitely one that adventurous readers seeking something long, strange and deeply human will want to check out.
Levin has been one of my favorite writers since I read The Instructions, his massive and brilliant and massively brilliant debut novel, nearly a decade ago. I’m overjoyed to report that Bubblegum only further solidifies my high opinion of his talent.
Highly recommended. Not a book for everybody, but definitely one that adventurous readers seeking something long, strange and deeply human will want to check out.
September 27, 2021
5.0 Stars — Adam Levin is — I fully understand— A somewhat acquired taste. Levin’s work is deeply involved & requires a somewhat patient, comically cynical readers inner-voice to perhaps wholeheartedly commit to. But what that commitment does, is transform from a payoff that morphs into a revelation. A revelation that is in-perpetual & alters your view of what the novel is and what it can be. Levin is honestly that good! Like DFW before him, AL takes no prisoners and makes no apologies for writing what he writes. He doesn’t care what you think & he is a master storyteller whom I believe could write anything he wanted — Be it the opus of mankind or a 1700 page diatribe about the perks of a constantly-choosing-tails-mindset in coin-tosses.
This marvellous, fun, witty & down right enlightened mega-novel is one that I definitely need to cogitate on for a while & reread chunks of both for pleasure & to further fully appreciate. But wow, the higher expectations I might have had, have been abundantly surpassed! It's neurotic random-diatribe loving Narrator, Belt Magnet is perfectly bewildering & this internet free world is as engaging & wonderous as any universe as I can remember!
Belt Magnet is a character living in an alternate world in today’s times, where there’s no internet but instead these weird little robot-animals called curios Instead — and is a character whom has a deep connection to inanimate objects, animals & not-animals. Drawing on the deep connection between some animals and owners with certain illnesses, Levin builds his diagnosed psychotic protagonist to have a deep connection to many things in a profound way. He has a hopelessly overtly supportive father that often shows his love in odd-moronic ways but most of all He has a self-low-loathing that’s so richly painted and yet so unexplored at the same time. The mere complexity itself is a character.
Bubblegum is a trenchant and epic doctrine akin to noting. Else you’ll ever read. Deep, enchanting, bloody hilarious — Bubblegum is a tale that mocks empathy and dazzles the prose of Levin’s crazy ramblings & makes an honest and romantic summation of the piss-taking perspective of our world. Levin’s is a mashup of DeLillo, Kafka, SFW, Saunders & Max Barry and he’s the most talented penman alive.
This marvellous, fun, witty & down right enlightened mega-novel is one that I definitely need to cogitate on for a while & reread chunks of both for pleasure & to further fully appreciate. But wow, the higher expectations I might have had, have been abundantly surpassed! It's neurotic random-diatribe loving Narrator, Belt Magnet is perfectly bewildering & this internet free world is as engaging & wonderous as any universe as I can remember!
Belt Magnet is a character living in an alternate world in today’s times, where there’s no internet but instead these weird little robot-animals called curios Instead — and is a character whom has a deep connection to inanimate objects, animals & not-animals. Drawing on the deep connection between some animals and owners with certain illnesses, Levin builds his diagnosed psychotic protagonist to have a deep connection to many things in a profound way. He has a hopelessly overtly supportive father that often shows his love in odd-moronic ways but most of all He has a self-low-loathing that’s so richly painted and yet so unexplored at the same time. The mere complexity itself is a character.
Bubblegum is a trenchant and epic doctrine akin to noting. Else you’ll ever read. Deep, enchanting, bloody hilarious — Bubblegum is a tale that mocks empathy and dazzles the prose of Levin’s crazy ramblings & makes an honest and romantic summation of the piss-taking perspective of our world. Levin’s is a mashup of DeLillo, Kafka, SFW, Saunders & Max Barry and he’s the most talented penman alive.
November 22, 2020
THE PLOT: Bubblegum by Adam Levin is a science fiction story based in an alternate, present-day world—one in which the internet has never existed and instead is dominated by a new species of "flesh-and-bone robots" called Curio. The book is told in the form of a memoir of the main character, Belt Magnet, who feels out of sync with the world around him. For starters, he has a condition which allows him to hear and speak with inanimate objects, or “inans” and while he is an adult, he struggles to perform even the most simple adult responsibilities and instead has to rely on others to take care of him. On top of that, whenever Belt speaks to someone, there is something about him that makes others drone on and on in a monologue style, which feels a lot like never ending word vomit. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
WHAT I LIKED: What I loved most about this book is the way it uses a fictional, alternate world that’s in many ways completely absurd while also being relatable to our current world and portraying situations that really make you think critically about life. I also enjoyed the writing style immensely! I liked the way that it was written in the form of a memoir by the main character, Belt Magnet, and that it was thorough in the way it described the world and situations while also being hilarious in often a dark way. And probably most of all, I just loved how bizarre the story was. It made reading it extremely interesting and I found myself engrossed in each chapter.
WHAT I DIDN’T LOVE: While I really enjoyed the book, I did feel that it was unnecessarily long and I found myself tiring of the page after page of what felt like never-ending monologues by various characters as well as the internal dialog from Belt. The book is almost 800 pages densely packed, tiny font print which I think is marvelous when the story is really interesting—which Bubblegum is—but at times it feels like certain sections drag on for no reason. I think the story could have been told with far less pages but if you enjoy a thorough read, this might be perfect for you!
THE VERDICT: I really enjoyed reading Bubblegum. It is the type of book that you can read over the course of a month and really submerse yourself in the story and the bizarre world that Adam Levin has created. Now that the book is coming out next week, I’m so excited to order the audiobook so I can listen to the whole thing again and pick up on things that I may have missed during the first read through.
WHAT I LIKED: What I loved most about this book is the way it uses a fictional, alternate world that’s in many ways completely absurd while also being relatable to our current world and portraying situations that really make you think critically about life. I also enjoyed the writing style immensely! I liked the way that it was written in the form of a memoir by the main character, Belt Magnet, and that it was thorough in the way it described the world and situations while also being hilarious in often a dark way. And probably most of all, I just loved how bizarre the story was. It made reading it extremely interesting and I found myself engrossed in each chapter.
WHAT I DIDN’T LOVE: While I really enjoyed the book, I did feel that it was unnecessarily long and I found myself tiring of the page after page of what felt like never-ending monologues by various characters as well as the internal dialog from Belt. The book is almost 800 pages densely packed, tiny font print which I think is marvelous when the story is really interesting—which Bubblegum is—but at times it feels like certain sections drag on for no reason. I think the story could have been told with far less pages but if you enjoy a thorough read, this might be perfect for you!
THE VERDICT: I really enjoyed reading Bubblegum. It is the type of book that you can read over the course of a month and really submerse yourself in the story and the bizarre world that Adam Levin has created. Now that the book is coming out next week, I’m so excited to order the audiobook so I can listen to the whole thing again and pick up on things that I may have missed during the first read through.
September 9, 2023
Reminded me of when I read David Foster Wallace for the first time. Passing through phases of amusement to annoyance to disgust, then subtly sliding into intrigue, fascination and finally settling on the far side of appreciation, but only through much readerly turmoil, many near-death-by-boredom experiences. If you like Adam Levin you will probably like Joshua Cohen.
But Levin in this book is preposterous. The main character is difficult, to say the least. As other reviews amply point out, he is not a person anyone in their right mind would want to spend any amount of time with in real life, yet here we are, spending 800 pages with Belt Magnet. We learn a lot about him. How he ended up with that cringey name - though we have to wait hundreds of pages for that answer, how he talks to inanimate objects, or rather they talk to him, and he talks back, and then he occasionally grants their desires, which are usually depressive and suicidal desires, desires which he unsurprisingly identifies with. The whole murdering of swingsets thing got on my nerves. But then you get into the whole idea of sentience, how the author grants sentience to certain objects at seeming random, and lets the main character stumble around and interact with them, before we are introduced to the non-sentient or semi-sentient flesh-and-blood robot pets. Add to that plenty of drug use, some history, gender politics, lots of satire and social commentary, all from the perspective of an incredibly paranoid obsessive compulsive individual. The sprawling paragraphs, the endless psychological double-binds and self-analysis, and worrying, and prattling dotage. Actually the best parts are typically dialogue. Dozens of absurd, slapstick side characters who talk like no one you ever met, who could and will expostulate on the subject of handkerchiefs or the novelty of fisting for hours at a time.
The only way I got through this book was by listening to the audiobook at three times speed. The readers did an excellent job. It is a cinematic book, but it hides its literary aspirations under a veneer of impossible scenarios, dreamlike surrealism, and a beating heart. Despite all of the plot contrivances, the superabundance of money in the main character's life, which he acquires more through his inability to function as a normal human being might - except what is normal in this world is laughable or horrifying in ours. This is an alternate reality we are reading about, one with a simultaneous grounding in nostalgia for the nineties and some futuristic technology geared more toward Consumerism and wastoid existence than any sort of bright future.
Find in it shades of comedy, scenes you will feel guilty for laughing at, and perhaps Levin is laughing at all of us, or with us. Storytelling at a slant, peering into the corrupt soul of people.
One of the most interesting characters is Fonda Jane Henry, the intersex sex worker-cum-artist celebrity, who comes off as one of the most real humans on display, versus the stilted father, the quirky and belligerent bullies. Our viewpoint, Belt Magnet, is alternately a child who acts like an adult and then an adult who acts like an infant. He is the most frustrating sack of...
But if you go into it with a casual attitude and aren't waiting to be impressed the whole time, and don't roll your eyes at the feats of description Levin contorts with, he might just sneak up and surprise you in the end.
But Levin in this book is preposterous. The main character is difficult, to say the least. As other reviews amply point out, he is not a person anyone in their right mind would want to spend any amount of time with in real life, yet here we are, spending 800 pages with Belt Magnet. We learn a lot about him. How he ended up with that cringey name - though we have to wait hundreds of pages for that answer, how he talks to inanimate objects, or rather they talk to him, and he talks back, and then he occasionally grants their desires, which are usually depressive and suicidal desires, desires which he unsurprisingly identifies with. The whole murdering of swingsets thing got on my nerves. But then you get into the whole idea of sentience, how the author grants sentience to certain objects at seeming random, and lets the main character stumble around and interact with them, before we are introduced to the non-sentient or semi-sentient flesh-and-blood robot pets. Add to that plenty of drug use, some history, gender politics, lots of satire and social commentary, all from the perspective of an incredibly paranoid obsessive compulsive individual. The sprawling paragraphs, the endless psychological double-binds and self-analysis, and worrying, and prattling dotage. Actually the best parts are typically dialogue. Dozens of absurd, slapstick side characters who talk like no one you ever met, who could and will expostulate on the subject of handkerchiefs or the novelty of fisting for hours at a time.
The only way I got through this book was by listening to the audiobook at three times speed. The readers did an excellent job. It is a cinematic book, but it hides its literary aspirations under a veneer of impossible scenarios, dreamlike surrealism, and a beating heart. Despite all of the plot contrivances, the superabundance of money in the main character's life, which he acquires more through his inability to function as a normal human being might - except what is normal in this world is laughable or horrifying in ours. This is an alternate reality we are reading about, one with a simultaneous grounding in nostalgia for the nineties and some futuristic technology geared more toward Consumerism and wastoid existence than any sort of bright future.
Find in it shades of comedy, scenes you will feel guilty for laughing at, and perhaps Levin is laughing at all of us, or with us. Storytelling at a slant, peering into the corrupt soul of people.
One of the most interesting characters is Fonda Jane Henry, the intersex sex worker-cum-artist celebrity, who comes off as one of the most real humans on display, versus the stilted father, the quirky and belligerent bullies. Our viewpoint, Belt Magnet, is alternately a child who acts like an adult and then an adult who acts like an infant. He is the most frustrating sack of...
But if you go into it with a casual attitude and aren't waiting to be impressed the whole time, and don't roll your eyes at the feats of description Levin contorts with, he might just sneak up and surprise you in the end.
March 8, 2020
I always try to finish books I review for NetGalley, but with this one I just couldn't get past about 120 pages. The blurb made it sound much different than it is. It actually advertised this as "hilarious" but it was just kind of uncomfortable. Although the premise seemed original, the characters and dialogue felt familiar, adapted from other tales of pubescent boys and misogynistic misanthropes. Not my cup of tea.
September 20, 2019
I am sure that there are people who will love this novel set in an alternate America, but I found it tedious. The narrator, a schizophrenic, details his life in a very meta memoir filled with fantasy, memories, rants, and pithy commentary, but it's a slog to read and not terribly original.
April 21, 2020
I count myself among the motley throngs who gobbled up Adam Levin’s massive and stupefying and stupefyingly precocious debut novel THE INSTRUCTIONS shortly after its publication by the redoubtable McSweeney’s a full decade ago. Is ‘precocious’ too condescending a word? Does it reek of belittlement? Perhaps the terminology ought be more properly reserved for the Levin debut’s pint-sized juvenile hero. Also, I must concede that I have no idea whether or not there was indeed a throng or throngs of readers who gobbled up THE INSTRUCTIONS. Seems impossible there’d not have been. But what do I know? I am a very peculiar person. Peculiarly peculiar. It might make sense to add, sort of doubling back ever so slightly, that I might be inclined to utilize the perhaps-slightly-condescending-or-even-belittling term ‘precocious’ on account of how THE INSTRUCTIONS was the first giant novel that I immediately thought was one of the great achievements of our era that also happened to have been written by someone more or less in my age group, a fella only two or three years older than myself. I didn’t get around to Levin’s story collection HOT PINK until seven or eight years after I read THE INSTRUCTIONS, but I wrote then about how partway through said collection’s opening story I had a flash of recognition; I recognized very clearly the voice and sensibility I had encountered in the hulking, giddily anarchic debut. This voice and sensibility were and are familiar to me in a way that comes to strike me as having to do with more than merely the singular stratagems of the very fine craftsman responsible for the three books he's published thus far. My feeling is that Levin and I were reared to a large extent in something like the same amorphous sociocultural soup. I have had occasion to write over the last few years on the subject of other very fine writers who are roughly in my generational cohort. Born in late 1979, I am myself a member of what some commentators deem the Xennial cohort, a kind of intergeneration that is not quite Generation X and not quite Millennial. Part of what is purported to distinguish this Xennial cohort is our relationship with the internet, the ubiquitous centrality of which did not figure into our childhoods at all, the internet having only begun to dominate in our early adulthoods. In writing about Elif Batuman’s very fine THE IDIOT, another novel (it more a quasi-autofiction) with which I identified very personally, I noted that both Batuman (or at least her protagonist) and I myself did not have either internet access or an email address until we started our first respective years of undergraduate studies at post-secondary institutions. Elif Batuman was born in 1977, and is even closer in age to Levin than she is to me. Most write-ups on BUBBLEGUM, Levin’s new and absolutely monumental novel, focus on its fantastical erasure of the internet from contemporary life. The world of the novel is more or less ours, unmistakably so, the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi, and the Wachowski sisters present and accounted for, but the World Wide Web has been extracted from the equation, an intervention that I cannot imagine anybody will be able to overlook. The dust jacket summation of the Doubleday (not to be confused with Dubble Bubble) first edition begins by addressing this very fact: “BUBBLEGUM is set in an alternate present-day America in which the Internet does not exist and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology—a ‘flesh-and-bone robot’ called the Curio—has pervaded the cultural imagination and dominated the global economy since the 1980s.” Naturally, since the internet is not present it can only be read into the novel—and would almost certainly have to be!—as a structuring absence, a lacuna in possession of expressive capabilities and reverberatory potencies. In a lovely bit of highly characteristic self-reflexive cleverness (this is a novel rife with intertextual interventions and self-reflexive gambits), Levin will have his narrator-protagonist, Belt Magnet, a writer nearing forty, saddled since early adolescence with a “psychotic disorder not otherwise specified,” address his (i.e. Belt’s) sole published novel, NO PLEASE DON’T, and the matter of that novel’s eschewal of the inclusion of Curios, an analogous sort or absence to that of the internet in BUBBLEGUM, Belt going so far as to explicitly state that not incorporating Curios or Curio-related epiphenomena into NO PLEASE DON’T was a highly conspicuous choice but one which, quod erat demonstrandum, NO PLEASE DON’T cannot directly demonstrabo. Belt is, like myself, peculiarly peculiar, his relationship with Curios (once called Botimals, generally known colloquially as cures, one vernacularly riffing youngster at one point deploying “curebotsky”) exists far afield of the normative insofar as concerns the greater world of this alternative near-present (and recent past). I am myself a little prone to psychosis. Technically, I am decreed Bipolar One or Two with Psychotic Features, though I have not had anything resembling a psychotic episode in quite some time. A neat bit of happenstance: as a young kid, one of my first powerful experiences of terrifying hallucinatory delirium found me racing into my parents' bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, wailing my heart out, assailing my perplexed mother with the incoherent complaint that the ‘batteries’ in my ‘jeans’ had no ‘labels.’ Is Belt Magnet not something like an analogue for Jeans Batteries? The timeline of BUBBLEGUM is essentially split, part of the narrative focus devoted to events occurring in 1988, the other part devoted to events occurring in 2013 and 2014, a period in which a number of chickens come home to roost for Belt, and in which we are led to believe (or play at believing) he has commenced with the composition of the “memoir” we are currently reading. Two very decisive years. For Belt Magnet. And for me (you can call me Jeans Batteries if it pleases you). Let us get me out of the way. 1988 was big because the Winter Olympics happened in Calgary, my hometown, which was a big deal for me, a little boy. 2013 was big, because Calgary experienced an apocalyptic flood which nearly completely destroyed the building I lived in (along with innumerable others), witnessed my last epic suicidal alcoholic spree, and saw me off to my final treatment centre, a place from which I would embark, in 2014, upon the pretty great life I live today, coming up on six-and-a-half years sober et cetera. Maybe, then, it is of interest that in 1988 Belt Magnet befriends a young rich kid whose hyphenated surname, Pellmore-Jason, terminates in my given name, and will shortly thereafter (i.e. Belt will) be prescribed Haldol by a jaded psychiatrist named Emil Calgary. Do I sound crazy? All well and good. BUBBLEGUM begins with our genial memoirist Belt Magnet relating the tale of how Jonny “Jonboat” Pellmore-Jason (“the new, rich, blond kid”) came to steal a catchphrase (“Shut your piehole, cakeface”) from Belt, and by extension the Magnet family. Maternal Grandmother and Clyde, Belt’s father, would regularly declaim the phrase at absent parties (often newscasters and the like). Whereas THE INSTRUCTIONS began with a bunch of school boys waterboarding one another as a kind of lark, BUBBLEGUM begin with a Tetherball incident; though this may seem altogether more innocent, it is in its proper context equally evocative of borderline savage rites of boyhood fellowship, one of Levin’s principal themes, said theme operative to varying degrees in all three of his books. The setting is Wheelatine Township in “the greater Chicagolandarea.” Already demonstrating what would appear to be psychotic tendencies, 1988 Belt, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hears the voices of inans, which we might simply call the spirits of inanimate objects. Non-sentient things, or thing we presume non-sentient, communicate with Belt, and though he knows it sounds crazy—he’s no fool—he is nonetheless inclined to believe that they actually do communicate with him, though even if they don’t, it's still a phenomenon with which he has to actively live, and has had to live since early adolescence. Among the things that communicate with Belt are rusty swingsets. Very often rusty swingsets beg Belt to end their suffering. It is on this account that Belt Magnet as a boy of twelve or thirteen becomes something of a Chicagolandarea legend, having committed a spree of swingset murders, eleven of them, the third-to-last and second-to-last as acts performed for the exultation of gathered youth, the seeming totality of whom report experiencing a transformative, ecstatic communion of some kind. Belt also thereafter becomes known as a weird psycho or just a creepy weirdo. When his parents and the authorities discover that Belt believes the swingsets have asked him to murder them—and that he additionally believes many other varieties of object communicate with him—Belt finds himself a participant in the University of Chicago Friends Study, as such one of the very first caretakers of a Botimal, a “flesh-and-bone robot that think it's your friend” introduced to the world by Graham&Swords, a nefarious corporate entity previously known for its focus on armaments. Belt will be pulled from the study after the sudden death of his beloved mother, but not before meeting and becoming infatuated with a girl named Lisette who likewise suffers some not otherwise specified psychotic disorder. He will get to keep Kablankey (or Blank), the Botimal. Kablankey is still his constant companion in 2013. (Much as a Beanie Baby owl named Owlcibiades is mine.) By 2013, however, Belt’s relationship with Blank has become far more peculiar from a broader cultural standpoint. “I’d raised Blank from a marble, and I’d never made it clone, had never fed it formulae (formulae hadn’t been heard of yet; Curios, for that matter, were still branded Botimals; cure overload didn’t even have a name). I had never pinched it, much less punctured it, nor blocked its airways, nor shown it a cat. I’d never pulled any of its limbs from their sockets, nor thrown it down stairs, nor thrown it at a wall. I’d never thrown it.” 2013. Cures have long graduated into the veritable no-holds-barred outlet for the most vile of human drives. “Punching bags” doesn’t halfway cut it. Cures have popularly come to be understood as machines such that no ethical considerations would appear to obtain. A cure imprints on a person. A person overloads on a cure. Overloading on a cure is cuteness overload, an overflow of kawaii, and it destroys, kills, or “dacts” the cure. Belt: “I didn’t think it was right to dact a cure.” There would appear to be no position more wholly peculiar one could imagine in all of 2013 BUBBLEGUM’S world. Belt is, in this respect, a complete outlier, Blank probably by some measure the oldest cure in existence, uniquely, unthinkably undacted well past the age of twenty. BUBBLEGUM is in large part a comedy of cures. It can be a cute comedy. Insofar as pertains to Blank, whose "senso-emotional call-and-response tech" has made him an ace mimicker of comedy legends the likes of Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, cuteness predominates. The comedy can also be very dark, exceedingly grisly, complete with cure hangings practically straight out of NAKED LUNCH, and a videotaped first-grader overload orgy scored to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in F Major.” It is extremely irreverent stuff. Though BUBBLEGUM is a long novel, there is not exactly an ungainly profusion of characters, and most who show up in 1988 are destined to figure again in 2013, one way or another. Jonboat returns, father of a cure-obsessed aspiring-artist son known as “Triple-J” (the third J standing for Junior), and now married to superfamous intersex theorist-advocate Fondajane Henry (heh heh). Fondajane Henry may well be implicitly making a case for Levin’s irreverence when she tells Belt the following: “I know that’s the fashionable MO lately—the seeking out and taking of offence—but I think it’s unfortunate. More than unfortunate. It’s counterproductive. Ugly, even. It goes against just about everything I worked toward during my days as an advocate and activist. It’s one of the reasons I retired from teaching.” Levin’s humour also works at the level of craft. Of style and language. In a sense he resembles Lydia Davis, whose very short works have very often struck me as a pratfall comedy of analysis paralysis. Command of analysis, ratiocination, and language, at which Belt excels, nevertheless leave him stymied, alienated. Bubblegum itself figures in terms of the comedy of runaway analysis. First early on (Blank assesses at great length what bubblegum might or might not represent, deciding he would prefer it stand for nothing rather than for stasis), then in the middle (Gus, a bank security guard with a sideline in handkerchiefs, asserts, in a lengthy two-way consideration, that he dislikes the way bubblegum “Configures chewers’ faces into wiseacre semblances”), and finally near the end (bubblegum left drying in public places may not be “pavement melanoma,” but perhaps merely “black? slightly raised? misshapen?”). If cures replace the internet in BUBBLEGUM, they are like the internet a repository for what is most venal and stupid in us. Cures and virtual online interactive spaces both become domains in which impotent (out)rage manifests itself pathetically and unavailingly. They both involve the grotesque consumption/despoliation of cuteness. Not everybody in BUBBLEGUM shares Belt’s discursive finesse. Boys especially are wont to fuck up idiomatic expression, misapplying ocelot in the place albatross, urbane for germane, Topeka for Eureka, respectable for respective, Appalachians for appellations. Girls are more likely to properly utilize “pin money” or "bury the lede.” Behold the ignoble Robbie, Belt’s dark double, his maximally clunky patter captured in Belt’s exceedingly-well-remunerated transcription of Triple-J’s Curio snuff film video collage: "Thank you for your time, Dr. Martin, and for giving me the opportunity to hopefully earn some extra credit for class so that this fifth year will be my last here at the university that I love so much but I realize it is time to move on from and forward into my life as a wage-earning citizen and adult of this great country that you and I live in together and hope to improve even though it is already the best in the world and which that is why it is the best in the world because of how citizens like the two of us won’t settle for good enough even when good enough equals best. We won’t settle.” Yikes? It’s funny, for sure, very much the stuff of comedy. But it expresses so terribly well—very, very terribly well—where we find ourselves right now, in our world without cure, our cureless, ingloriously networked Babylon. Just…yikes. I mean...am I right or what?
March 12, 2022
{...} people don't want personal computers, they want personal slaves. They want people they can do anything with. Torture, fuck, smash, love, rebuild, restructure to any graham cracker grandeur... We want to craft dolls that wind themselves up.
—Sturge Fellini, in John Sladek's 1989 novel Bugs, pp. 84-85
I think the excerpt above gets right to the heart of Adam Levin's 2020 novel Bubblegum, even though Levin was just a kid when the underrated Mr. Sladek's novel came out... because in this slaunchwise alternate universe, that's exactly what we got—instead of personal computers and the Internet that connects them, America became obsessed with "cures" (short for Curios, the brand name that corporate giant Graham&Swords settled on after "Botimals" tested rather poorly). And cures are... well, they're a whole lot like Sladek's "dolls that wind themselves up." They're biological robots. The company's very clear on that point: according to the source, Curios are nothing but things—even though they're made of flesh and crafted specifically to bond with and depend upon a single human being.
And even though they hurt. Cures get progressively cuter as they get older, you see—and the cuter they get, the more people want to... well, to kill them. Hug 'em to death. Bite they little heads off. Smoosh 'em. Whatever it takes. The connection Levin draws between cuteness and torture is inspired, to be sure, but it's also disgusting, a perverse superstimulus.
I felt increasingly betrayed by Bubblegum, in fact, as the book started wallowing in the many ways of killing Curios, lingering ever more lovingly on the details. Superstimulus or not, the casual and near-universal acceptance of "dacting" (short for "redacting") cures became progressively more abhorrent—and if that's the point of Levin's novel, I have to question whether it should really take 767 pages (not including indicia and acknowledgements) to get across.
*
The beginning of Bubblegum is much like that of Levin's mammoth debut novel The Instructions, which I read back in 2011. Our protagonist, the oddly-named Belt Magnet, is neurotic, overthinking everything, even how much he overthinks things.
If you're reluctant to trust in my conscientiousness, I do understand. I rarely trust in that of other memoirists myself. It's one of the reasons I so rarely read memoirs. With just a couple exceptions, the only way that I've gotten through the ones that I have read is by pretending they were novels. I even enjoyed a few of those. So were I to somehow learn that you were reading this as a novel, I'd say, "Go ahead." I'd probably do the same, were I in your shoes.
—p.51
Everyone with any sort of speaking role in Bubblegum speaks the same way Belt does, actually—has that same sort of DFW Lite™ interior monologue, is the same sort of garrulous overthinker, is—oh god I'm doing it myself now, aren't I, will they notice, am I insane for just going off like this—going off, like... like spoiled meat? How can I... okay, pull it together now.
Okay.
All I'm sayin's (and may I say here how proud I am of that particular hard-to-parse conversational locution, which strikes me as quintessentially Levin-like. Levinish. Levinoid?)... anyway, if this sort of thing floats your boat (not even getting into the whole "man-in-the-boat = clitoris" thing, this is a whole 'nother kind of metaphorical boat, and 1/2 of you probably don't even have clitorides) is, if this sort of thing floats your (metaphorical) boat, then herein is lots of boat to float.
The joke was my own, and no one else got it.
—p.731
There were other things about Bubblegum that I disliked as well, I'm afraid. For one example: do kids still grow up awash in a sea of (mostly homophobic) slurs? Would they? Sure, that was my experience back in the 1970s, in the scintillating cultural hub that was Huntington, West Virginia... but even without the Internet (and with the added brutality of 'dacting cures'), I would have thought this would get better, at least to some extent.
And then there's Jonboat, Belt Magnet's golden-boy classmate, a character who can say in all seriousness,
"This is sports. It's for real. It matters to people."Sheesh.
—p.11
Even the conceit that "the Internet doesn't exist" is inconsistently applied; there are several mentions of movies using "CGI," but it's hard to imagine that technology being developed without all the rest creeping in as well.
*
The last time I read Adam Levin's work was in 2012, when I ran across his collection Hot Pink. I kinda liked that one, and I got sucked pretty deeply into The Instructions too... but Bubblegum was a lot (heh) harder to swallow, and only somewhat redeemed by what I will admit was a charmingly ambiguous ending.
If y'all like this sort of thing (and there are certainly a lot of positive reviews for this novel), more power to ya. After Bubblegum, though, I'm going to have to think long and hard before picking up another one of Levin's offerings...
April 7, 2020
There are two types of people in this world: the kind that likes books like "Bubblegum," and those (the majority of people) who do not.
The synopsis of this book, which describes an alternate world in which the internet was never created and where people have flesh-and-blood robots that fit in the palm of their hand, may make you think that it's a more or less straight-forward adult science fiction (I did). But it's not.
This is dense, full-on, experimental literary fiction.
What this book actually is, is the memoir of Belt Magnet, a grown man who still lives with his father and does not know how to do simple adult tasks like banking and driving a car. A man who is infamous for murdering swingsets as a child (because they asked him to), who wrote a book that nobody has read, and who, for some reason, people tend to spew their entire existences to in everyday conversations. On occasion, he speaks to inanimate objects (not just swingsets) but has no idea how he does this.
This book is largely written in a stream-of-consciousness style with many meandering moments, interspersed with mentions and allusions to pieces of media, only a few of which exist in the state they are described in our current world, and the rest of which are either totally made up or completely changed (like The Matrix sans internet...). Other times, we step into lengthy flashbacks, read manuals (sometimes, twice), or transcripts of odd video collages and other such works. Meanwhile, we meet the author several times and are forced to read through gruesome scenes of animal-like-creatures being tortured and killed in pretty sadistic ways with little to no consequences for the torturers (but with the intention of making some grand point...which was not always clear to me).
The story has a very frail, almost nonexistent, plot, as the book is more focused on revealing Belt’s life, and meeting the many crude characters he encounters, which babble on for egregious amounts of time about nothing in particular. Everyone in this book is extremely long-winded, unbelievably strange, and completely unlikeable...except maybe Kablanky...who isn't actually a person and never speaks.
However, this book is not supposed to be read to be enjoyed but to be understood and pondered. So, if you’re ok with not finding joy in any particular part of a book, but are still willing to hold out for the small hope that you will understand it in the least, then go forth and read "Bubblegum." I bid you well.
I kept reading this book with the faintest faith that I would come to some fundamental conclusion about whatever life-changing thing it was trying to tell me. But I never really grasped anything that substantial, and I don’t think many other average readers will either.
This book is one of those books that comes with prior required reading (Slaughterhouse-Five, etc.) and either a classroom setting in which to discuss it (at times, I felt like I should be back in my experimental literature class in college...), a master’s degree in the subject, or a plethora of notes in order to really register what the point of it all is.
But it’s a very very long version of this type of thing and I couldn’t help thinking that at times it was trying more at the aesthetic of the genre than it was doing anything profound with all of its 784 pages....which seemed like altogether too much time to be spent in such an unwelcoming world.
I find it hard to rate something that I enjoyed so little while also knowing that it may be the best example ever of not being the correct audience for something. Although, I think it's also fair to say that the real audience for this, the group of people that it is truly accessible to, is a very small group of people. A group of very smart, slightly masochistic, people. The kind of people that like books like Et Tu, Babe (who I don’t trust in the least and who I'm unsure of the existence of to this day...).
I rated "Bubblegum" 2.5 out of 5 stars, after involving some math; taking into account a rating of 1 for my own reading pleasure, a 5 for what I’m sure it’s doing that I don’t understand (and for those few people who like that kind of thing), and averaging them.
If anyone finds notes for this one, so that I may finally feel it was worth the many hours I spent reading it, let me know.
Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday books for an early copy in exchange for an honest review!
The synopsis of this book, which describes an alternate world in which the internet was never created and where people have flesh-and-blood robots that fit in the palm of their hand, may make you think that it's a more or less straight-forward adult science fiction (I did). But it's not.
This is dense, full-on, experimental literary fiction.
What this book actually is, is the memoir of Belt Magnet, a grown man who still lives with his father and does not know how to do simple adult tasks like banking and driving a car. A man who is infamous for murdering swingsets as a child (because they asked him to), who wrote a book that nobody has read, and who, for some reason, people tend to spew their entire existences to in everyday conversations. On occasion, he speaks to inanimate objects (not just swingsets) but has no idea how he does this.
This book is largely written in a stream-of-consciousness style with many meandering moments, interspersed with mentions and allusions to pieces of media, only a few of which exist in the state they are described in our current world, and the rest of which are either totally made up or completely changed (like The Matrix sans internet...). Other times, we step into lengthy flashbacks, read manuals (sometimes, twice), or transcripts of odd video collages and other such works. Meanwhile, we meet the author several times and are forced to read through gruesome scenes of animal-like-creatures being tortured and killed in pretty sadistic ways with little to no consequences for the torturers (but with the intention of making some grand point...which was not always clear to me).
The story has a very frail, almost nonexistent, plot, as the book is more focused on revealing Belt’s life, and meeting the many crude characters he encounters, which babble on for egregious amounts of time about nothing in particular. Everyone in this book is extremely long-winded, unbelievably strange, and completely unlikeable...except maybe Kablanky...who isn't actually a person and never speaks.
However, this book is not supposed to be read to be enjoyed but to be understood and pondered. So, if you’re ok with not finding joy in any particular part of a book, but are still willing to hold out for the small hope that you will understand it in the least, then go forth and read "Bubblegum." I bid you well.
I kept reading this book with the faintest faith that I would come to some fundamental conclusion about whatever life-changing thing it was trying to tell me. But I never really grasped anything that substantial, and I don’t think many other average readers will either.
This book is one of those books that comes with prior required reading (Slaughterhouse-Five, etc.) and either a classroom setting in which to discuss it (at times, I felt like I should be back in my experimental literature class in college...), a master’s degree in the subject, or a plethora of notes in order to really register what the point of it all is.
But it’s a very very long version of this type of thing and I couldn’t help thinking that at times it was trying more at the aesthetic of the genre than it was doing anything profound with all of its 784 pages....which seemed like altogether too much time to be spent in such an unwelcoming world.
I find it hard to rate something that I enjoyed so little while also knowing that it may be the best example ever of not being the correct audience for something. Although, I think it's also fair to say that the real audience for this, the group of people that it is truly accessible to, is a very small group of people. A group of very smart, slightly masochistic, people. The kind of people that like books like Et Tu, Babe (who I don’t trust in the least and who I'm unsure of the existence of to this day...).
I rated "Bubblegum" 2.5 out of 5 stars, after involving some math; taking into account a rating of 1 for my own reading pleasure, a 5 for what I’m sure it’s doing that I don’t understand (and for those few people who like that kind of thing), and averaging them.
If anyone finds notes for this one, so that I may finally feel it was worth the many hours I spent reading it, let me know.
Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday books for an early copy in exchange for an honest review!
September 5, 2019
I cried and laughed out loud so many times throughout this book (a couple moments that inspired both were the breakdown of how it feels to have $25 billion dollars vs. $20 billion in your bank account and 'The Golden Child' volume/valium story).
Similar (to me) to 'The Instructions''s main character, Belt's style of breaking down a single moment of thought was so addictive. I kept wanting more but some paragraphs/pages made me feel like I just ran a brain marathon, so many breaks from reading were taken. That's not a diss.
As a once physically sick and mentally questionable child from a family on a tight budget, I felt the mother/son flashbacks were perfect in so many ways. I'm fighting back the urge to jabber on about how much I loved these moments. Many near-tears reading those. Heavy tears after her letters to Belt near the middle of the novel.
The father/son relationship was very hard to decipher at first, but the third third of the book was swimming in wonderful interactions.
SPOILER PART:
The only part that made me squirm was Adam Levin being inserted into the book. With all of the references to Vonnegut throughout, I was pretty sure this was a LevinMagnet/VonnegutTrout homage situation, so I wanted to like it. But still feel squirmy. That whole letter-segment in France with the product placement of his wife's book (it worked, however, I'm gonna pick up a copy, but...) just seemed thrown in as an inside joke.
KIND OF SPOILER PART(?):
When this ARC showed up at work, I flipped out. 'The Instructions' and 'Hot Pink' are favorites of mine, and I had no clue that a new book was even close to being available. I couldn't wait for my shift to end, so I could speed-finish the book I was into and get started on 'Bubblegum'. So during that shift, I impatiently drooled the back of the book multiple times.
Now that I've finished it, I wish that the description would have left out the fact that the 'internet does not exist.' I would have liked to experience the novel having to figure that out for myself.
When 'The Sixth Sense' was in theaters, I went with a friend who didn't own a TV and hung out with a crew that talked more about music and comic books than current movies. During the first half of the movie she was visually and audibly disturbed by what she saw. Later on, when HJO tells BW that he sees dead people, I heard a slight her utter a slight "ahh...". Working at the movie theatre, I saw the trailer about 100 times before it was released so "I see dead people" was already an inside joke made with coworkers. She never saw the preview, so this moment (a good way into the film) was huge for my friend. I wish I never read the back of the book.
It didn't ruin it. Just a hindsight thing. I did, too, find the idea that in a world without the internet, 9/11 took two extra days to organize amusing.
All in all, I like.
Similar (to me) to 'The Instructions''s main character, Belt's style of breaking down a single moment of thought was so addictive. I kept wanting more but some paragraphs/pages made me feel like I just ran a brain marathon, so many breaks from reading were taken. That's not a diss.
As a once physically sick and mentally questionable child from a family on a tight budget, I felt the mother/son flashbacks were perfect in so many ways. I'm fighting back the urge to jabber on about how much I loved these moments. Many near-tears reading those. Heavy tears after her letters to Belt near the middle of the novel.
The father/son relationship was very hard to decipher at first, but the third third of the book was swimming in wonderful interactions.
SPOILER PART:
The only part that made me squirm was Adam Levin being inserted into the book. With all of the references to Vonnegut throughout, I was pretty sure this was a LevinMagnet/VonnegutTrout homage situation, so I wanted to like it. But still feel squirmy. That whole letter-segment in France with the product placement of his wife's book (it worked, however, I'm gonna pick up a copy, but...) just seemed thrown in as an inside joke.
KIND OF SPOILER PART(?):
When this ARC showed up at work, I flipped out. 'The Instructions' and 'Hot Pink' are favorites of mine, and I had no clue that a new book was even close to being available. I couldn't wait for my shift to end, so I could speed-finish the book I was into and get started on 'Bubblegum'. So during that shift, I impatiently drooled the back of the book multiple times.
Now that I've finished it, I wish that the description would have left out the fact that the 'internet does not exist.' I would have liked to experience the novel having to figure that out for myself.
When 'The Sixth Sense' was in theaters, I went with a friend who didn't own a TV and hung out with a crew that talked more about music and comic books than current movies. During the first half of the movie she was visually and audibly disturbed by what she saw. Later on, when HJO tells BW that he sees dead people, I heard a slight her utter a slight "ahh...". Working at the movie theatre, I saw the trailer about 100 times before it was released so "I see dead people" was already an inside joke made with coworkers. She never saw the preview, so this moment (a good way into the film) was huge for my friend. I wish I never read the back of the book.
It didn't ruin it. Just a hindsight thing. I did, too, find the idea that in a world without the internet, 9/11 took two extra days to organize amusing.
All in all, I like.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 28, 2020
This book sounded so quirky and weird and like something that would be right up my alley. The book WAS quirky and weird. The protagonist was one Belt Magnet, a diagnosed psychotic who hears voices of inanimate objects like swing sets, playground surfaces and pillows. Belt lives in an alternative history America where the internet was never invented and instead sometime in the late 80s small "flash and blood robots" called Curios were sold. These small companions need to be near their bonded human for a majority of the day or they die of heartbreak.
So that's where we are at, right? sounds like it could be a cool story. The narrator is unreliable in that he hears things that may not really be there. He also goes off on long rambling thoughts about various things and lots of people he encounters in the world speak to him in monologs.
I wanted to like this book but it was a bit too much for me. Too long, too much rambling, too many weird asides, a bit too much misogyny.
I received a digital copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
So that's where we are at, right? sounds like it could be a cool story. The narrator is unreliable in that he hears things that may not really be there. He also goes off on long rambling thoughts about various things and lots of people he encounters in the world speak to him in monologs.
I wanted to like this book but it was a bit too much for me. Too long, too much rambling, too many weird asides, a bit too much misogyny.
I received a digital copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
May 5, 2023
Love it when I read something and if someone asks me about it I wouldn't even know where to begin. Singulary bizarre, absurd and mundane, also really like when a sci fi focuses in on ordinary events and the differences in the setting to the real world are mostly just by-to-by stuff that everyone sees as ordinary.
July 12, 2022
Was a bit worried when I started this that my interest would wain, because it's such a large and heavy book... so it's been laying about my place for a good few months now. I'll have to say that there were points where it dragged but that's true of some shorter books, but it's a testament to this.. testament... that my interest increased throughout the 2nd half... and on the whole I found that even the bits that dragged added up to its philosophical whole... making it a very worthwhile experience; and in fact, as I was reading it I started to look at things differently, subjectively it lifted my day to day experience... and it's both at times funny and sad and wilfully post modern and - probably for some - alienating in terms of structure.
May 28, 2020
3.5. First appeared here: https://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.c...
Remember Adam Levin? Ten years ago, he published a thousand-page, post-modern novel called The Instructions that earned him the mantle of the "next David Foster Wallace." Well, 10 years later, he's back with another digressive, massive, frustrating, hugely entertaining novel titled Bubblegum. Not much has changed: He's still up to his DFW-esque-ness here, having as much fun toying with his reader as he is actually telling a story. And he even winks at all those idiots (like me) who think he is the next DFW by including a brief snippet with a DFW-like character.
And but so (sorry), Bubblegum is a huge goofy smart novel about an alternate reality that looks just like ours, except there's no Internet and people have these little robotic pets called Curios. Our narrator is a fellow named Belt Magnet, and he is in his late 30s and lives with his drunk father, who likes to berate him for being a loser. Belt published one little-read novel a decade before but hasn't done anything since, except collect social security checks. Though in Belt's defense, he does have some issues — not the least of which is that he talks to inanimate objects...and they talk back.
So we set sail on 780 pages of Belt telling us about his life — how his former best friend is now a global superstar, how he spends most of his time with his own Curio named Blank, his only real friend, and how he is basically rudderless, smoking a lot and wondering where things went wrong.
But that sort of belies what Levin is really up to here. So...what is he really up to? Frankly, I don't have the slightest damn idea, other than to point out that we humans are infinitely weird, often disappointing, but never not interesting. We become obsessed with things, and these obsessions taking over our entire culture...and often common sense dies a slow, sad death along the way.
A lot of this novel — including an interminable 100 pages in the middle that's a transcript of a movie made up of a number of clips all about Curios —is about "Curio culture." Belt participated in a sort of pet-therapy experiment when he was a kid to try to help him with his mental issues. He became one of the first Curio owners, before they exploded in popularity and are used for everything from a club drug (you boil their bones and extract their marrow and it gets ya high!) to entertainment.
And again, to tell this story, we get numerous digressions and expositions and page-long jokes, etc. These are almost always entertaining...except when they're not. And that's really the rub: A lot of this is massively fun, super smart, and frankly, awe-inspiring. But when it's not, it's frustrating and annoying as hell.
So I could spend several more paragraphs telling you about some more of this plot but you'll probably decide to read this based on how willing you are to accept a certain degree of aggravation in your novels. If your answer to that is "zero aggravation," then this probably isn't the book for you. But if, like in some of DFW's work, you go into this knowing not every digression or two-page-long tangent will totally work, but many will, and the good outweighs the bad, then give Mr. Levin a try here. Hey, if nothing else, the cover is scratch-and-sniff, and literally smells like bubblegum. So that's fun!
Remember Adam Levin? Ten years ago, he published a thousand-page, post-modern novel called The Instructions that earned him the mantle of the "next David Foster Wallace." Well, 10 years later, he's back with another digressive, massive, frustrating, hugely entertaining novel titled Bubblegum. Not much has changed: He's still up to his DFW-esque-ness here, having as much fun toying with his reader as he is actually telling a story. And he even winks at all those idiots (like me) who think he is the next DFW by including a brief snippet with a DFW-like character.
And but so (sorry), Bubblegum is a huge goofy smart novel about an alternate reality that looks just like ours, except there's no Internet and people have these little robotic pets called Curios. Our narrator is a fellow named Belt Magnet, and he is in his late 30s and lives with his drunk father, who likes to berate him for being a loser. Belt published one little-read novel a decade before but hasn't done anything since, except collect social security checks. Though in Belt's defense, he does have some issues — not the least of which is that he talks to inanimate objects...and they talk back.
So we set sail on 780 pages of Belt telling us about his life — how his former best friend is now a global superstar, how he spends most of his time with his own Curio named Blank, his only real friend, and how he is basically rudderless, smoking a lot and wondering where things went wrong.
But that sort of belies what Levin is really up to here. So...what is he really up to? Frankly, I don't have the slightest damn idea, other than to point out that we humans are infinitely weird, often disappointing, but never not interesting. We become obsessed with things, and these obsessions taking over our entire culture...and often common sense dies a slow, sad death along the way.
A lot of this novel — including an interminable 100 pages in the middle that's a transcript of a movie made up of a number of clips all about Curios —is about "Curio culture." Belt participated in a sort of pet-therapy experiment when he was a kid to try to help him with his mental issues. He became one of the first Curio owners, before they exploded in popularity and are used for everything from a club drug (you boil their bones and extract their marrow and it gets ya high!) to entertainment.
And again, to tell this story, we get numerous digressions and expositions and page-long jokes, etc. These are almost always entertaining...except when they're not. And that's really the rub: A lot of this is massively fun, super smart, and frankly, awe-inspiring. But when it's not, it's frustrating and annoying as hell.
So I could spend several more paragraphs telling you about some more of this plot but you'll probably decide to read this based on how willing you are to accept a certain degree of aggravation in your novels. If your answer to that is "zero aggravation," then this probably isn't the book for you. But if, like in some of DFW's work, you go into this knowing not every digression or two-page-long tangent will totally work, but many will, and the good outweighs the bad, then give Mr. Levin a try here. Hey, if nothing else, the cover is scratch-and-sniff, and literally smells like bubblegum. So that's fun!
September 3, 2023
Days when a man without a hanky was trash…. Used to be a man wanted him some love he'd look for a woman who was crying at a bar or some party, maybe just a bus stop, and he'd take out his hanky, offer it to her. Let her know he sees her…. He'd offer his hanky, which carried his essence- the smell of his pocket, laundry detergent, maybe cologne he was that type of fellow…. maybe letting her know the first essence- whiff's free, but the second, if she wants it, is gonna have strings…Any way you cut it, you've got ambiguity. Subtlety. Things unsaid between two people. The hallmarks, my friend, of a classy courtship. Obsolescence of the hanky was a blow to society. Dulled a man's ability, and to some extent his willingness, to read your more artfully interpersonal-type signals the better half the species tend to want to relay. More rapes, I'd wager, since hankies disappeared, and less romance discovered….Wasn't just the theater of dating got changed since the hanky's disappearance from everyday life, see.
March 6, 2020
4.5 Stars. A doozy! A blast! A challenge! A long, strange trip: Bubblegum is an infuriatingly, thrillingly, DEEP dive into one person's psyche and soul. It's also a neon pink funhouse mirror reflecting and distorting America into a weird, wild alternate world that still feels true. Consumerism, striving for "success", trend and technology obsessions, the haves and have-nots, family and childhood, adulthood and power, it's all here and more. Levin's smart, darkly imaginative satire will appeal to fans of Wallace's Infinite Jest, Delillo's White Noise, and Lethem's Chronic City, while the amazingly immersive narrative voice will remind readers of Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caufield and Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius J. Reilly. Wowza! P.S. Is it too long? Perhaps, but only half-a-star too long.
November 19, 2019
This novel is misogynist and transphobic! Avoid!
July 27, 2020
Most of what people talk about when they talk about Bubblegum is how deft a satire of our materialistic society it is. These folks aren’t wrong. Bubblegum is a book fixated on relationships—often the relationship between a person and their “cure.” (For the uninitiated, cures are cute little flesh and blood robots that think they’re your friend.) The human-cure relationship is one way in terms of power. Cures require humans to live. They’re hatched from gumball-like eggs, imprint on whomever cuddles them most often, and then exist almost entirely to please the human they’ve imprinted on. The problem is that the cures are so unspeakably cute that they cause people to “overload”—lose control and destroy the cures. In the novel, overloading is initially seen as scary and weird but it ends up quickly leading to a strange sort of fetish-economy where all sorts of gadgets, doo-dads, transformative formulas, and designer drugs are created solely for the enjoyment of destroying the cures. Exploits with the aforementioned doo-dads, etc. are frequently and grotesquely detailed. The reader sees people in the novel time and again willfully torturing or overloading on cures. This is the interesting part of Bubblegum. What the hell sort of meaning are we supposed to make from it? Levin draws parallels between the way people treat cures and almost every aspect of our society. Lotta Hogg and her inability to control her diet. Chad-Kyle and trend obsession/trend setting. Fondajane’s seminal text about sexworkers that ends up legalizing prostitution is titled “flesh and blood robots that think they’re your friend,” the same thing the original cure packaging refers to cures as. You can hardly go ten pages in the novel without seeing some part of our consumerist society weirdly rendered as a human’s relationship with their cure.
It goes without saying that all of the above could come across as sanctimonious or boring if it weren’t for the detailed and entertaining mythos that Levin makes of his world. The section titled Portfolio in the early middle of the novel uses several “primary documents” to show us how the world of Bubblegum came to have cures as well as how they’re treated now. (For fans of nerdy literary technique, this section also has an absolute hall of mirrors of an intended author—very cool to see Levin pull it off.)
As usual Levin’s writing is in top form. It’s inventive and funny and tough in a way that almost no one writing today pulls off. Actually I’ll say it: when Levin is at his best, no one writing today can pull off the turns of phrase and punch of his writing. He is that good. Nevertheless this is also at times, by virtue of its protagonist, a very boring book. Belt Magnet is so analytical and so obsessed with the minutiae of a given *possible* thought that sometimes there are whole pages dedicated to reasoning out why he might have said one thing but ultimately chose the thing he did—after eliminating all options in between. It can be exhausting. For sure, the first 150-200 pages of the book and the 500-600th pages of this book are tough. But, despite these flaws, the book’s highlights really do reward the reader for sticking with it. You’ll never catch me saying that about Dickens, the scab.
June 13, 2020
This book taught me how physically difficult it can be to read while perpetually rolling one's eyes.
This is a supremely self-indulgent book, masturbatory in its constant self-congratulation. The main character is an author of a book that's said to be low-profile and not easy to find, yet every important character has read it and agrees upon its genius. Adam Levin himself gets name-checked early on, and then appears late in the book as a minor character - like everyone else, he's a great admirer of our narrator's literary prowess. A prowess which somehow allows for endless inane monologues full of run-on-sentences which do nothing to advance the plot, enrich our understanding of the characters, or even amuse the reader.
God, this book was boring.
Other problems: the book is set in Chicagoland, but is glaringly white. The only female character to develop any dimension dies so that the main character can be sad. The other female characters include two manic pixie dreamgirls, a fat woman who we know we're supposed to find repulsive because her name is Lotta Hogg and various parts of her quiver and wobble, and an intersex woman who fetishistically epitomizes female beauty while still having a penis, which we know all about because she apparently speaks publicly and often about her genitalia. This woman also single-handedly creates a pro-trans vs. anti-beauty dichotomy by stating publicly that the trans women she's known weren't beautiful because they couldn't pass. She's supposed to be a genius who also pushes the country into legalized prostitution and same sex marriage, apparently by the sheer force of her personality - a personality which, sadly, never actually makes an appearance. Instead we get a cardboard cutout with the words "beautiful genius with intriguing genitals" written in magic marker on her forehead.
If the book had been trimmed down (seriously, who edited this mess) to just the parts with the inans and the Curios, it might have been okay. I liked the stuff with the inans, and while I find the portrait of human nature (or American culture?) revealed by the Curios to be repulsive, I don't find the stance invalid. Incorrect (I think) (I hope), but not invalid.
Side note - is Myopic Books in Chicago buying books again yet? I mean, I'll look it up, I know how to Google - I'm just looking forward to getting this big pink brick of disgust and boredom out of my house already.
This is a supremely self-indulgent book, masturbatory in its constant self-congratulation. The main character is an author of a book that's said to be low-profile and not easy to find, yet every important character has read it and agrees upon its genius. Adam Levin himself gets name-checked early on, and then appears late in the book as a minor character - like everyone else, he's a great admirer of our narrator's literary prowess. A prowess which somehow allows for endless inane monologues full of run-on-sentences which do nothing to advance the plot, enrich our understanding of the characters, or even amuse the reader.
God, this book was boring.
Other problems: the book is set in Chicagoland, but is glaringly white. The only female character to develop any dimension dies so that the main character can be sad. The other female characters include two manic pixie dreamgirls, a fat woman who we know we're supposed to find repulsive because her name is Lotta Hogg and various parts of her quiver and wobble, and an intersex woman who fetishistically epitomizes female beauty while still having a penis, which we know all about because she apparently speaks publicly and often about her genitalia. This woman also single-handedly creates a pro-trans vs. anti-beauty dichotomy by stating publicly that the trans women she's known weren't beautiful because they couldn't pass. She's supposed to be a genius who also pushes the country into legalized prostitution and same sex marriage, apparently by the sheer force of her personality - a personality which, sadly, never actually makes an appearance. Instead we get a cardboard cutout with the words "beautiful genius with intriguing genitals" written in magic marker on her forehead.
If the book had been trimmed down (seriously, who edited this mess) to just the parts with the inans and the Curios, it might have been okay. I liked the stuff with the inans, and while I find the portrait of human nature (or American culture?) revealed by the Curios to be repulsive, I don't find the stance invalid. Incorrect (I think) (I hope), but not invalid.
Side note - is Myopic Books in Chicago buying books again yet? I mean, I'll look it up, I know how to Google - I'm just looking forward to getting this big pink brick of disgust and boredom out of my house already.
May 4, 2020
After reading quite a few of your (the community’s) reviews, I noticed that a lot of the low ratings were accompanied by comments that stated the reader had given up in the page range of 90-150, and I, not wanting to be just another person who gave up at or before that mark, pushed on through the somewhat tedious, monotonous Part I of the book, but I’m glad I kept going because Part II is when I really started enjoying reading it, and when, I think, Levin really got his grip and started writing in the style we all love from The Instructions.
From the start of Part 2, it felt like a whole new story. Before I knew it, I was almost done with the book, having thoroughly enjoyed it along the way. Like his other books, Bubblegum left me wanting more, but I’m happy to feel that way rather than have the book hastily concluded with a cheesy ending.
Levin needs some time to set the stage, but once he gets rolling, he delivers full force.
From the start of Part 2, it felt like a whole new story. Before I knew it, I was almost done with the book, having thoroughly enjoyed it along the way. Like his other books, Bubblegum left me wanting more, but I’m happy to feel that way rather than have the book hastily concluded with a cheesy ending.
Levin needs some time to set the stage, but once he gets rolling, he delivers full force.
July 20, 2021
In the declining years of the twentieth century, the newfound creation of the “internet" dug its claws into society's collective imagination and has since refused to let go. In Adam Levin's strange dollhouse image of a world that’s close to but not quite our own, that creation does not and has never existed. In its place, the object of our fixation is something else entirely:
"flesh-and-bone robots that think they're your friends"
Much in the same way I suggested the internet affected us all, Bubblegum dug its claws into me. Levin, for all his discursive maximalising (yes, it’s a word – I checked) has an innate gift for capturing the artless paroxysms of human thought. His novel – and I use that word loosely, given that he seems hell-bent on hacking away at conventional narrative form (not unlike a rusty swing set) – is deeply solipsistic in a way that only the loneliest of obsessive-compulsives will find touchingly familiar. The all-consuming neuroses of everyday thought are forefronted as his narrator, Belt Magnet, navigates a world he does not feel at home in… in spite of being one of the key figures who built it.
He watches as a new technology gains societal traction, and retreats when he’s faced with the many ways we find to pervert it. For all his inertness in action, our sadsack hero is confronted with reconciling a responsibility for the ugliness that surrounds him, and a powerlessness against in its momentum. There’s a weird, idiosyncratic irony at feeling small when you’re sitting next to a five-inch tall puff-ball that’s tapdancing on your coffee table. If that doesn’t make sense reading it now, don’t worry – it will.
Levin dilates in and out of his narrator’s mind with an anxious brutality that speaks to me in a way I don’t come across often in fiction. I’m both troubled and deeply moved by what I’ve just read and feel confident in my presumption that it will be staying with me for years to come.
I’ll end this reaction post with a brief litmus test for any of you who’re still on the fence of potential interest: If you were provoked by Wallace’s question of “how much entertainment is too much?”, then perhaps you’ll find in Bubblegum a new question to ask:
What matters more…
What we create, or what we do with it?
"flesh-and-bone robots that think they're your friends"
Much in the same way I suggested the internet affected us all, Bubblegum dug its claws into me. Levin, for all his discursive maximalising (yes, it’s a word – I checked) has an innate gift for capturing the artless paroxysms of human thought. His novel – and I use that word loosely, given that he seems hell-bent on hacking away at conventional narrative form (not unlike a rusty swing set) – is deeply solipsistic in a way that only the loneliest of obsessive-compulsives will find touchingly familiar. The all-consuming neuroses of everyday thought are forefronted as his narrator, Belt Magnet, navigates a world he does not feel at home in… in spite of being one of the key figures who built it.
He watches as a new technology gains societal traction, and retreats when he’s faced with the many ways we find to pervert it. For all his inertness in action, our sadsack hero is confronted with reconciling a responsibility for the ugliness that surrounds him, and a powerlessness against in its momentum. There’s a weird, idiosyncratic irony at feeling small when you’re sitting next to a five-inch tall puff-ball that’s tapdancing on your coffee table. If that doesn’t make sense reading it now, don’t worry – it will.
Levin dilates in and out of his narrator’s mind with an anxious brutality that speaks to me in a way I don’t come across often in fiction. I’m both troubled and deeply moved by what I’ve just read and feel confident in my presumption that it will be staying with me for years to come.
I’ll end this reaction post with a brief litmus test for any of you who’re still on the fence of potential interest: If you were provoked by Wallace’s question of “how much entertainment is too much?”, then perhaps you’ll find in Bubblegum a new question to ask:
What matters more…
What we create, or what we do with it?
March 12, 2023
Decided to read this one before trying The Instructions since I was in the mood for something long, but not massive. And I really enjoyed it. This was hilarious, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read as far as how many times it actually made me laugh out loud. It’s messy, it doesn’t need to be nearly as long as it is, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to take away from it, but it was so much fun that I hardly care. I feel much more enthusiastic about jumping into Levin’s other work after reading this one, and it broke the spell of mediocre books I’d been picking so far this year.
January 25, 2021
It's ridiculous that a book this good has only 1 star reviews that call it masturbatory. Yes it is masturbatory, but it is glorious. It is masturbation that demands to be not only watched, but studied.
Masturbate on my fellow postmodern fiction readers and writers.
My one real line from a review I wish I could write: this book made me want to consult an in-universe Wikipedia to find out more information on particular plot points and events. If that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
Masturbate on my fellow postmodern fiction readers and writers.
My one real line from a review I wish I could write: this book made me want to consult an in-universe Wikipedia to find out more information on particular plot points and events. If that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is.
December 29, 2020
This is a very unusual novel; hard to write about without including spoilers. Recommended if you enjoy reading [about]:
-The banality of barbarism
-The limits of imaginative empathy
-The banality of barbarism
-The limits of imaginative empathy
November 21, 2020
Brilliantly frustrating....longer review to come after I stew on it a bit.
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