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Mount Chicago
From the award-winning author of Bubblegum and The Instructions, a daring new novel about the absurdity, the humor, and the tragedy of survivorship.
“Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest.” –George Saunders, bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo
A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city’s mayor must struggle to move forward while the world—quite literally—caves beneath their feet. With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy and Jewish identity, celebrity, drugs, and animal psychology, Levin has constructed a monument to laughter, love, art, and resilience in an age of spectacular loss.
“Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest.” –George Saunders, bestselling, award-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo
A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city’s mayor must struggle to move forward while the world—quite literally—caves beneath their feet. With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy and Jewish identity, celebrity, drugs, and animal psychology, Levin has constructed a monument to laughter, love, art, and resilience in an age of spectacular loss.
592 pages, Hardcover
First published August 9, 2022
About the author
Adam Levin
19 books456 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 145 reviews
February 11, 2023
5 Stars — Adam Levin, the more time that passes and the more images this prodigious, self-confessed-neurotic-manic-crazy-man. The more his work takes on a tour de force aura. This particular paragon — Mount Chicago — Is perhaps his most intricate and ambitious works yet. That’s a big call to make, but considering the more complex narrative interweaved with the bold choice of a more simplistic vernacular, is what makes this such a compelling and at times earth-shattering novel.
I cannot offer much more right now without much more cogitation upon re-reading of marked 250+ passages — such is the dizzying impact of Levin’s words on my psyche. Yes, it is what is I must admit, that Levin is my personal favourite author alive today, and is so by a distance of the length of the stairway to the heavens — so therefore my bias needs to be circumnavigated to offer a truly impartial review and offer insights into the bat-shit-crazy-genius-terror that is Levin’s structure and prose.
I can say that Levin has clearly made some significant strides in the harnessing of his majestic word-smithery. As there are much less lengthy diatribes that offer little more than anecdotal evidence of the protagonist’s broken and twisted yet poignant musings. Instead we see a much more layered narrative that is of a more staid propulsion.
I can also highly recommend anyone whom enjoys literary-genius, a good time & an off-the-wall magic carpet ride through a narrative that offers a different perspective of a post apocalyptic earth, where things go — for me — much more like they would, should the unthinkable occur than almost any other scenario I’ve read, which is a multitude to be sure.
Levin is a master and whisky this is not Bugglegum or The Instructions, and a work of staggering complexity using trademark simplicity & Juan-insight that cuts to the bone on a transcendent scale. But it is a majestic novel, that parlays todays modern world frailties and hypocrisy in a way that allows the reader to interpret in the manner they most resonate with. This novel is one that like most Levin work — smuggled itself into your senses & command you
To take another peek or to try the audiobook for a second reading with a different perspective altered by pacing and distance in the text! He is a genuine master-craftsman that I suspect or prognosticate that he will be as vaunted and lauded as a true literary-fiction legend somewhere between Saunders & DFW.
I can’t plead enough with anyone whom likes Saunders if DFW or Doctorow or any genuinely brilliant Literary Fiction ‘stud’ — that you give Levin a solid, comprehensive, exhaustive try.. just trust me!!!
I cannot offer much more right now without much more cogitation upon re-reading of marked 250+ passages — such is the dizzying impact of Levin’s words on my psyche. Yes, it is what is I must admit, that Levin is my personal favourite author alive today, and is so by a distance of the length of the stairway to the heavens — so therefore my bias needs to be circumnavigated to offer a truly impartial review and offer insights into the bat-shit-crazy-genius-terror that is Levin’s structure and prose.
I can say that Levin has clearly made some significant strides in the harnessing of his majestic word-smithery. As there are much less lengthy diatribes that offer little more than anecdotal evidence of the protagonist’s broken and twisted yet poignant musings. Instead we see a much more layered narrative that is of a more staid propulsion.
I can also highly recommend anyone whom enjoys literary-genius, a good time & an off-the-wall magic carpet ride through a narrative that offers a different perspective of a post apocalyptic earth, where things go — for me — much more like they would, should the unthinkable occur than almost any other scenario I’ve read, which is a multitude to be sure.
Levin is a master and whisky this is not Bugglegum or The Instructions, and a work of staggering complexity using trademark simplicity & Juan-insight that cuts to the bone on a transcendent scale. But it is a majestic novel, that parlays todays modern world frailties and hypocrisy in a way that allows the reader to interpret in the manner they most resonate with. This novel is one that like most Levin work — smuggled itself into your senses & command you
To take another peek or to try the audiobook for a second reading with a different perspective altered by pacing and distance in the text! He is a genuine master-craftsman that I suspect or prognosticate that he will be as vaunted and lauded as a true literary-fiction legend somewhere between Saunders & DFW.
I can’t plead enough with anyone whom likes Saunders if DFW or Doctorow or any genuinely brilliant Literary Fiction ‘stud’ — that you give Levin a solid, comprehensive, exhaustive try.. just trust me!!!
October 8, 2023
Difficult to know what to say to briefly encapsulate this one -- but it's hilarious and brilliant and very sad in a kind of Infinite Jest / The Last Samurai way.
August 14, 2022
Yeah, definitely my favorite Levin. Loved.
Read
September 30, 2022Video on Adam Levin's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvAgG...
February 17, 2025
“…he wished Sylvie’d admire him. He doubted she was even aware of it, though, the generosity of his intentions….She gave no indication of being aware of it, and there wasn't any way he could think of to make her aware of it without undermining his claim to generosity, if not the generosity itself. If you ask that your generosity be acknowledged as generosity, did that not transform it into something— or reveal it to be something-other than generosity?
Enough fucking Talmud.”
Gladman, a comedian and writer, loses his entire family to a sinkhole. A benefit concert and Mount Chicago, a monument commemorating the dead, are in the works. Apter, from the Chicago mayor’s office, asks Gladman to perform. He agrees but first Apter must agree to take Gladman’s Quaker parrot, Gogol, for a few days.
“‘The goal of every memorial should be to be as moving as Auschwitz, but at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that the goal of every memorial should be to be as depressing. So what I want, I'm saying, is I want Mount Chicago to achieve that level of being moving, but also, at the same time, to be less depressing.’
‘Than Auschwitz,’ said Apter.
‘I want it to be a less depressing Auschwitz.’
‘A less depressing Auschwitz,’ said Apter.
‘Our less depressing Auschwitz,’ said the mayor.”
Enough fucking Talmud.”
Gladman, a comedian and writer, loses his entire family to a sinkhole. A benefit concert and Mount Chicago, a monument commemorating the dead, are in the works. Apter, from the Chicago mayor’s office, asks Gladman to perform. He agrees but first Apter must agree to take Gladman’s Quaker parrot, Gogol, for a few days.
“‘The goal of every memorial should be to be as moving as Auschwitz, but at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that the goal of every memorial should be to be as depressing. So what I want, I'm saying, is I want Mount Chicago to achieve that level of being moving, but also, at the same time, to be less depressing.’
‘Than Auschwitz,’ said Apter.
‘I want it to be a less depressing Auschwitz.’
‘A less depressing Auschwitz,’ said Apter.
‘Our less depressing Auschwitz,’ said the mayor.”
July 16, 2022
mount chicago is a hard to pin down novel, one that seems immensely autobiographical in spite of its fantastic inciting incident and in spite of (actually explicitly because of) the author's forward in which he distances the novel from autobiography. it's also a really recursive, shaggy dog story that fills up the pages with meandering and laying the some breadcrumbs to get us back to the "plot" but because it's more concerned with character (like most good novels) the plot is I guess basically nonexistent. It's also simultaneously very sad, because it's involves immense loss and because the ways in which the author directs the reader to recognize the ties to his own life, it in part reads like a panic attack of a novel, wherein a person manifests their worst fears and displays them. but...in that displaying there's a lot there about laughter and the beautiful moments that let life breathe. it's also, in spite of that, alternately, a fairly mean spirited novel where you can be blindsided by some of the characters judgments and actions and the way that they relate to the world. there are also multiple major moments that revolve around pooping, which, I mean, who among us.
also: features the most charming bird in all of literature. all those other literary birds can go screw; Gogol for life.
also: features the most charming bird in all of literature. all those other literary birds can go screw; Gogol for life.
October 18, 2022
First appeared at https://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.c...
I have some questions for you, Mr. Levin. You're a very good writer. You KNOW you're a very good writer. You're also a very self-aware writer. So when you're as good a writer as you are, and you fully understand what you're doing and its effect on your reader as well as you do, why do you insist on aggravating your reader just to the point where he wants to throw your novel across the goddamn room? Why? Why why why why why?
Is it because it helps the other 90 percent of the novel, which is truly a marvel, stand out in even more stark relief? Is it because you're just a prankster? Do you just like keeping your readers on their toes, making sure they're paying attention? Or is it because you truly like to inflict a small measure of pain on people?
It doesn't matter. I'll still read every damn word you ever write if the remaining words you write in your career are even one-third as f#%king incredible as the good 90 percent of Mount Chicago.
To my readers, most of whom I've probably already lost: Mount Chicago is one of the funniest novels I've ever read. That's the first time I've ever bolded a sentence in a review. Because that's really the one thing you need to know about this book. And when you consider it's sort of kind of tangentially about a massive tragedy that kills thousands of people, that's a pretty neat trick. And that's not the only trick. There's no line between author and novel here. As the kids say, so meta. Except maybe there is a line? Who knows? I'm not smart enough to try to figure that out. And I don't think Adam Levin wants you try.
To describe it further, and I fully realize this is an absolutely ridiculous analogy, and I have no doubt Adam Levin would hate this, but this is my small measure of payback for making me read pages and pages about behavioral psychology and parrots and that really, really long duck (yes, duck) joke: Mount Chicago is what would happen if Kurt Vonnegut on speed, a baked and giggly Philip Roth (can you imagine?!), and David Foster Wallace on...well, no, just normal DFW...had a book baby.
I can't find the passage or the interview now, and maybe I'm imagining this but, I think DFW said something really smart once about reader aggravation: That a good novel must have parts that aggravate the reader, but a good novelist knows just the right amount to antagonize his reader before he can pull back just in time, and entertain again. And so if you think about it, this novel's 575 pages, so 90 percent (again, my approximation for the non-purposefully-aggravating parts) of 575 is 517.5 INCREDIBLE pages. I like those odds. You probably skim over - whether on purpose or because you drift - 10 percent of every novel you read anyway, right?!
All right, so anyway: I loved this book. Absolutely loved it. You don't need to know what it's about, you can read that anywhere. But whatever you read that it's about, it's actually about Entourage (the HBO show) and metafiction and Chicago politics and psychology and cryptocurrency and other get-rich-quick-scams and the author's face and stand-up comedy and writing and depression and tragedy and love and coming-of-age and parrots.
READ THIS.
I have some questions for you, Mr. Levin. You're a very good writer. You KNOW you're a very good writer. You're also a very self-aware writer. So when you're as good a writer as you are, and you fully understand what you're doing and its effect on your reader as well as you do, why do you insist on aggravating your reader just to the point where he wants to throw your novel across the goddamn room? Why? Why why why why why?
Is it because it helps the other 90 percent of the novel, which is truly a marvel, stand out in even more stark relief? Is it because you're just a prankster? Do you just like keeping your readers on their toes, making sure they're paying attention? Or is it because you truly like to inflict a small measure of pain on people?
It doesn't matter. I'll still read every damn word you ever write if the remaining words you write in your career are even one-third as f#%king incredible as the good 90 percent of Mount Chicago.
To my readers, most of whom I've probably already lost: Mount Chicago is one of the funniest novels I've ever read. That's the first time I've ever bolded a sentence in a review. Because that's really the one thing you need to know about this book. And when you consider it's sort of kind of tangentially about a massive tragedy that kills thousands of people, that's a pretty neat trick. And that's not the only trick. There's no line between author and novel here. As the kids say, so meta. Except maybe there is a line? Who knows? I'm not smart enough to try to figure that out. And I don't think Adam Levin wants you try.
To describe it further, and I fully realize this is an absolutely ridiculous analogy, and I have no doubt Adam Levin would hate this, but this is my small measure of payback for making me read pages and pages about behavioral psychology and parrots and that really, really long duck (yes, duck) joke: Mount Chicago is what would happen if Kurt Vonnegut on speed, a baked and giggly Philip Roth (can you imagine?!), and David Foster Wallace on...well, no, just normal DFW...had a book baby.
I can't find the passage or the interview now, and maybe I'm imagining this but, I think DFW said something really smart once about reader aggravation: That a good novel must have parts that aggravate the reader, but a good novelist knows just the right amount to antagonize his reader before he can pull back just in time, and entertain again. And so if you think about it, this novel's 575 pages, so 90 percent (again, my approximation for the non-purposefully-aggravating parts) of 575 is 517.5 INCREDIBLE pages. I like those odds. You probably skim over - whether on purpose or because you drift - 10 percent of every novel you read anyway, right?!
All right, so anyway: I loved this book. Absolutely loved it. You don't need to know what it's about, you can read that anywhere. But whatever you read that it's about, it's actually about Entourage (the HBO show) and metafiction and Chicago politics and psychology and cryptocurrency and other get-rich-quick-scams and the author's face and stand-up comedy and writing and depression and tragedy and love and coming-of-age and parrots.
READ THIS.
July 1, 2022
I really wanted to like this Chicago-centric novel (due out on August 9) and use it as one of my book club selections this year. Despite a fabulous premise, a unique writing style and structure, some clever and witty dialogue, a few laugh out loud scenes, and two interesting, multi-dimensional characters plus a parrot named Gogol, I just don't think most readers will have the patience to slog through the nearly 600 pages. I kept telling myself to give up but something compelled me to finish it. I guess I'm glad I did, but the PW review validates my feelings: "Unfortunately, Levin undercuts the otherwise satisfying sociopolitical comedy with frustrating interjections about his struggles to write this novel and sell his previous one, his wife’s uncertainty about whether Apter or Gladman is supposed to be Levin, and many other asides that read like missives to creative writing students or nod to the difficulties of this latest project. As the frustrated reader will find, acknowledging a problem is not equivalent to solving it." The Kirkus review isn't as harsh but also criticizes Levin's ramblings: "Seemingly by design, the novel tests the reader's patience with long streams of obsessive musings on subjects ranging from pizza preferences to the films of Steven Spielberg . . ." And, the missives are really long that I eventually started to skim through them. It's really a shame because I think this novel had the potential to be really exceptional - it just gets in its own way. Readers who appreciate books like The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen, The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar, and Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday might find that Mount Chicago is their cup of tea.
August 13, 2022
This is a love it or hate it book. I loved it, but I understand anyone who hates it. It feels like a parody of a pretentious literary novel. Like if you had a Very Important Writer in a movie or TV show, this is the book he'd be writing. "I'm stuck on an extended sequence about how Hitler would eat an egg," or "There's a section of the book where I spend close to an hour telling a joke about a duck." But the author seems aware of this in a way that makes it unannoying, and all the asides and fourth wall breaks (Levin apologizes around 2/3 of the way through for how long the book has gotten) and tangentical stories... they all feel worthwhile. And they enhance the main story about the Chicago sinkhole (which isn't really the main story at all).
I do wish there'd been more about the sinkhole, really (screw you, Mr. Mayor, I'm not calling it 'the anamoly). Public reaction, national reactions... a huge chunk of downtown Chicago collapses and it seems like the world just continues on as normal once the infrastructure is restored. Seemed like there should've been space for a wider reaction.
All that said, definitely one of my favorite books of the year, but not one I'm likely to recommend to people just because there's a very sharp love/can't stand line for this sort of writing.
I do wish there'd been more about the sinkhole, really (screw you, Mr. Mayor, I'm not calling it 'the anamoly). Public reaction, national reactions... a huge chunk of downtown Chicago collapses and it seems like the world just continues on as normal once the infrastructure is restored. Seemed like there should've been space for a wider reaction.
All that said, definitely one of my favorite books of the year, but not one I'm likely to recommend to people just because there's a very sharp love/can't stand line for this sort of writing.
September 17, 2022
Levin is a combo of kurt vonnegut's zany absurdity and David foster Wallace's expansive storytelling
September 22, 2022
This is my first time reading a book by Adam Levin. Seeing as this is a new release I was hearing a lot about it leading up to its release. A newly published, maximalist novel, set in Chicago definitely had my interest peaked.
Unfortunately, I really felt let down by this book. The plot that is described in summaries and other's reviews, really isn't the focus of this book at all. Sure, a sinkhole opens in downtown Chicago causing immense damage and death and the book follows the characters living in the aftermath but that really only takes up maybe 100 pages of the book. Most of this book is long tangents on a wide variety of topics, many mundane and dull.
This is the kind of territory you get into with a maximalist novel but even when you are a fan of this kind of story there comes a threshold of tolerance. One might argue that these tangents and descriptive backstories add to the reader's understanding of the characters, which to an extent is true, but oftentimes I found these tangents of little value and many times just detracting from the overall story.
To get into it, these tangents mainly revolve around the characters of the novel (although some are more so anecdotal or just thoughts from the author directly). I may have enjoyed these tangents if I liked these characters but this book has got to hold some of my least liked characters in any book I've read.
The two main characters that this book focuses on are Solomon Gladman and Apter Schutz. Gladman is a stand up comedian who is also an author and teacher; his entire family is taken away from him in the disaster this book "centers" around. Apter is an "Except for Palestine" "Liberal" Edgelord Cryptobro who is a big fan of Gladman's work. These two meet throughout the story and their stories intertwine.
Of the two I have less of a problem with Gladman. He's irritating in his own right and overall very depressing. This is understandable and the point of his character since he has lost his entire family and he feels directionless without them. That being said, it doesn't seem like Gladman really had that great of an affinity for this family to begin with. From the backstory you get of him interacting with his family, mainly his wife, you can tell he likes her but doesn't really show much interest beyond what she can do for him and what she symbolizes to him. Overall he is just very defeatist and doesn't even try to see a future for himself after the event. I'm not saying I wouldn't react the same way given his circumstances but it doesn't make for a very inspiring protagonist.
Apter is by far my least favorite character (I now get how people feel when they completely write off the works of of Salinger or Kerouac due to their protagonists). Gladman and Apter share a lot of similarities but I think due to Apter being younger, and closer to my age, I found him to be more bothersome. Maybe it's because being someone who grew up in the same time frame as him I can better visualize someone like him, having met others who are similar.
If you've looked at some of the other reviews, particularly the one and two star reviews, you may notice a lot of people giving up the book after the first 100 pages. This is mainly due to events in the Apter storyline. For 150 pages readers are subjected to the detailed backstory of Apter, going from his early teenage years to his late twenties (when the events of the book take place).
One of these stories starts in his college years where he is too good for his peers. Judging how they act and essentially offering a very Holden Caufield take on how their level of progressiveness is bad and not like his. This section takes place during the mid 2010's; at the height of the SJW/Buzzfeed era. Now, I get wanting to capture the ridiculousness of this time period in a book but this section really came off as a cringy, off base, view of what "college campus liberals" were and are really like.
The stereotypes you imagine when I mention 2014-2016 Buzzfeed articles about manspreading or whatever are played up to a cartoonish level. I get that this is supposed to be an absurdist book and that not everything is an accurate reflection of reality (I mean we're talking about a book where a sinkhole destroys a defining part of downtown Chicago and the response to it is to create a memorial dedicated to everyone who lived through it) but this felt incredibly out of place compared to most of the rest of the book. This whole section really comes across as a contemporary Tim Allen bit where the joke tells more about the one saying it than the actual society that is being commented on.
Take this from someone who was attending a university mentioned in this book during this time, no actual college students acted like this. This whole section just came across as Levin showcasing that his only knowledge of college students in the last decade comes from youtube videos titled things like "SJW Owned by Facts and Logic Compilation Part 74". This wouldn't be as much an issue for me except this is a maximalist novel where so much effort is put into knowing about various subjects in order to accurately describe them in almost unnecessary amounts of detail.
Among their other similarities, Gladman and Apter share the trait of having immense wealth placed upon them. This really cuts down the stakes and value to everything they do. Money is pretty much an ex machina for them to get out of having to do anything too difficult, or compromise in any way. These characters pretty much get to do anything they want, which isn’t much, on their terms. This is a small element but it did cut down on my investment in them.
Both of these characters are quite clearly based on Levin; not entirely and he'll be sure to remind you, but it's undeniable to assume otherwise. There are many times where Levin utilizes metafiction and offers his own direct opinions and voice, which to be honest, aren't really that different from Gladman and Apter.
These three are really just shades of each other and it's generally something I just didn't really enjoy reading that much. There is such a judgmental, whiny, and irritating tone to a lot of what is described here and it was directed not just at other characters in the book but also the readers themselves. There definitely is an audience for this kind of thing but it really wasn't what I was looking for. Maybe this is just the drastic contrast of Levin compared to the other authors I've been reading this month (Morrison and Brautigan).
I might as well cover what I did like about the book. While I thought many of the tangents were unnecessary or deviating from the actual plot and purpose of the book, I did find some to be enjoyable and well crafted. When these moments hit for me they did really show Levin as a competent writer worthy of the hype I had been presented with prior to reading but unfortunately these sections were few and far between.
I will say that while the subject matter of these tangents might not have always entertained me, Levin has really figured out the structure to maximalist storytelling and can craft rabbit holes that are enticing and exciting to read from a narrative standpoint. I think what really kept me going through the dull moments was the excitement of reading a dense maximalist novel. I really was in the mood for a book of this style and while I felt let down ultimately, I did enjoy spending my time in a deeply vast world.
I read this book in just eight days. I'm not a fast reader and maybe some of this was spurred on by the fact that I only had three weeks to finish this before returning it to the library but I found it to be quite fast paced at times. I also found this book to be pretty straightforward to follow; compared to other maximalist novels. I would almost recommend this as a "baby's first maximalist novel" but I'd be more inclined to tell someone to read something more challenging with a greater payoff.
Another thing I have to commend Levin for doing with Mount Chicago is writing a book that feels so much on his terms. This is unashamedly the true work of this man put to page. This is almost to a fault. If there were things that were cut by an editor for straying too far off the path I'd be surprised and almost curious to know what they were. This book really is Levin going in whatever direction he wants and exploring or not exploring whatever he sees fit without regard for the reader or any other potential audience. This is a dangerous game and for me at least, I think it is a big part of my disappointment. Levin puts the reader through a lot, asking for their patience and tolerance without much of a reward for doing so.
This book is often described as an absurdist novel but to be honest, it really wasn't that absurd. Sure there are sections that are full on bizarre and occasionally highly imaginative but most of the time things are pretty straight laced and down to earth. While I do think the contrast between absurd and conventional is important to make that distinction more impactful I felt the book leaned more towards based in a true reality. Maybe it's just that I've read a lot of absurdist works and I have a higher expectation than others or that our real world becomes more and more absurd with each passing day but I felt this wasn't that off the wall.
As a book with Chicago in the title there really isn't that much Chicago. Sure there are moments that hit what I was expecting but many others I didn't really feel like the setting was being fully utilized. If this book took place in another city I wouldn't have liked it as much (although I'd probably not have picked it up in the first place). Some of the places referenced in this book are quite familiar to me as they are very local and while I did find it amusing the few times they were explored in detail I wish they had been visited more. (you can tell this is a work of fiction because there is no place in Humboldt Park that I know of where it is worth getting in your car to get a milkshake)
Unfortunately, I really felt let down by this book. The plot that is described in summaries and other's reviews, really isn't the focus of this book at all. Sure, a sinkhole opens in downtown Chicago causing immense damage and death and the book follows the characters living in the aftermath but that really only takes up maybe 100 pages of the book. Most of this book is long tangents on a wide variety of topics, many mundane and dull.
This is the kind of territory you get into with a maximalist novel but even when you are a fan of this kind of story there comes a threshold of tolerance. One might argue that these tangents and descriptive backstories add to the reader's understanding of the characters, which to an extent is true, but oftentimes I found these tangents of little value and many times just detracting from the overall story.
To get into it, these tangents mainly revolve around the characters of the novel (although some are more so anecdotal or just thoughts from the author directly). I may have enjoyed these tangents if I liked these characters but this book has got to hold some of my least liked characters in any book I've read.
The two main characters that this book focuses on are Solomon Gladman and Apter Schutz. Gladman is a stand up comedian who is also an author and teacher; his entire family is taken away from him in the disaster this book "centers" around. Apter is an "Except for Palestine" "Liberal" Edgelord Cryptobro who is a big fan of Gladman's work. These two meet throughout the story and their stories intertwine.
Of the two I have less of a problem with Gladman. He's irritating in his own right and overall very depressing. This is understandable and the point of his character since he has lost his entire family and he feels directionless without them. That being said, it doesn't seem like Gladman really had that great of an affinity for this family to begin with. From the backstory you get of him interacting with his family, mainly his wife, you can tell he likes her but doesn't really show much interest beyond what she can do for him and what she symbolizes to him. Overall he is just very defeatist and doesn't even try to see a future for himself after the event. I'm not saying I wouldn't react the same way given his circumstances but it doesn't make for a very inspiring protagonist.
Apter is by far my least favorite character (I now get how people feel when they completely write off the works of of Salinger or Kerouac due to their protagonists). Gladman and Apter share a lot of similarities but I think due to Apter being younger, and closer to my age, I found him to be more bothersome. Maybe it's because being someone who grew up in the same time frame as him I can better visualize someone like him, having met others who are similar.
If you've looked at some of the other reviews, particularly the one and two star reviews, you may notice a lot of people giving up the book after the first 100 pages. This is mainly due to events in the Apter storyline. For 150 pages readers are subjected to the detailed backstory of Apter, going from his early teenage years to his late twenties (when the events of the book take place).
One of these stories starts in his college years where he is too good for his peers. Judging how they act and essentially offering a very Holden Caufield take on how their level of progressiveness is bad and not like his. This section takes place during the mid 2010's; at the height of the SJW/Buzzfeed era. Now, I get wanting to capture the ridiculousness of this time period in a book but this section really came off as a cringy, off base, view of what "college campus liberals" were and are really like.
The stereotypes you imagine when I mention 2014-2016 Buzzfeed articles about manspreading or whatever are played up to a cartoonish level. I get that this is supposed to be an absurdist book and that not everything is an accurate reflection of reality (I mean we're talking about a book where a sinkhole destroys a defining part of downtown Chicago and the response to it is to create a memorial dedicated to everyone who lived through it) but this felt incredibly out of place compared to most of the rest of the book. This whole section really comes across as a contemporary Tim Allen bit where the joke tells more about the one saying it than the actual society that is being commented on.
Take this from someone who was attending a university mentioned in this book during this time, no actual college students acted like this. This whole section just came across as Levin showcasing that his only knowledge of college students in the last decade comes from youtube videos titled things like "SJW Owned by Facts and Logic Compilation Part 74". This wouldn't be as much an issue for me except this is a maximalist novel where so much effort is put into knowing about various subjects in order to accurately describe them in almost unnecessary amounts of detail.
Among their other similarities, Gladman and Apter share the trait of having immense wealth placed upon them. This really cuts down the stakes and value to everything they do. Money is pretty much an ex machina for them to get out of having to do anything too difficult, or compromise in any way. These characters pretty much get to do anything they want, which isn’t much, on their terms. This is a small element but it did cut down on my investment in them.
Both of these characters are quite clearly based on Levin; not entirely and he'll be sure to remind you, but it's undeniable to assume otherwise. There are many times where Levin utilizes metafiction and offers his own direct opinions and voice, which to be honest, aren't really that different from Gladman and Apter.
These three are really just shades of each other and it's generally something I just didn't really enjoy reading that much. There is such a judgmental, whiny, and irritating tone to a lot of what is described here and it was directed not just at other characters in the book but also the readers themselves. There definitely is an audience for this kind of thing but it really wasn't what I was looking for. Maybe this is just the drastic contrast of Levin compared to the other authors I've been reading this month (Morrison and Brautigan).
I might as well cover what I did like about the book. While I thought many of the tangents were unnecessary or deviating from the actual plot and purpose of the book, I did find some to be enjoyable and well crafted. When these moments hit for me they did really show Levin as a competent writer worthy of the hype I had been presented with prior to reading but unfortunately these sections were few and far between.
I will say that while the subject matter of these tangents might not have always entertained me, Levin has really figured out the structure to maximalist storytelling and can craft rabbit holes that are enticing and exciting to read from a narrative standpoint. I think what really kept me going through the dull moments was the excitement of reading a dense maximalist novel. I really was in the mood for a book of this style and while I felt let down ultimately, I did enjoy spending my time in a deeply vast world.
I read this book in just eight days. I'm not a fast reader and maybe some of this was spurred on by the fact that I only had three weeks to finish this before returning it to the library but I found it to be quite fast paced at times. I also found this book to be pretty straightforward to follow; compared to other maximalist novels. I would almost recommend this as a "baby's first maximalist novel" but I'd be more inclined to tell someone to read something more challenging with a greater payoff.
Another thing I have to commend Levin for doing with Mount Chicago is writing a book that feels so much on his terms. This is unashamedly the true work of this man put to page. This is almost to a fault. If there were things that were cut by an editor for straying too far off the path I'd be surprised and almost curious to know what they were. This book really is Levin going in whatever direction he wants and exploring or not exploring whatever he sees fit without regard for the reader or any other potential audience. This is a dangerous game and for me at least, I think it is a big part of my disappointment. Levin puts the reader through a lot, asking for their patience and tolerance without much of a reward for doing so.
This book is often described as an absurdist novel but to be honest, it really wasn't that absurd. Sure there are sections that are full on bizarre and occasionally highly imaginative but most of the time things are pretty straight laced and down to earth. While I do think the contrast between absurd and conventional is important to make that distinction more impactful I felt the book leaned more towards based in a true reality. Maybe it's just that I've read a lot of absurdist works and I have a higher expectation than others or that our real world becomes more and more absurd with each passing day but I felt this wasn't that off the wall.
As a book with Chicago in the title there really isn't that much Chicago. Sure there are moments that hit what I was expecting but many others I didn't really feel like the setting was being fully utilized. If this book took place in another city I wouldn't have liked it as much (although I'd probably not have picked it up in the first place). Some of the places referenced in this book are quite familiar to me as they are very local and while I did find it amusing the few times they were explored in detail I wish they had been visited more. (you can tell this is a work of fiction because there is no place in Humboldt Park that I know of where it is worth getting in your car to get a milkshake)
September 24, 2022
Picked this one up as soon as it was available, as I've very much liked Levin's other work. I loved it. It made me laugh uproariously, it made me roll my eyes, and most importantly, it really got my brain cells firing. The books that give me the non-somatic equivalent of a tingly brain are the ones I tend to gravitate toward, and e.g. thinking about this book as a book about how we relate as human beings through stories provoked a real tingle. I won't be so bold as to suggest that that's what the book is "about" (another thing I like about Levin's books is that I mostly take them to be pieces of art rather than being capital-A About things), but it's part of what the book got me thinking about, and that was fun.
November 10, 2022
Adam Levin is one of our best, most inventive living writers - maybe my FAVORITE writer - and his last novel, Bubblegum, was my definitive pandemic novel that helped me during the early months of all that crap.
So it sucks to say that this book is very much a mixed bag. It contains some of Levin’s best writing to date, and also the most frustrating/tedious sections of his career. At a certain point in the novel, Levin speaks directly to the reader and says, basically, that the book has gotten out of control and that it was only meant to be a spry, <200 pages. And at nearly 600 pages, Mount Chicago really has nothing to justify its own length. Often times I had to take a break from it because I was so bored.
The last 150 pages though, have some of my favorite sections in any book, ever, which is why this is 4 stars. Specifically I’m talking about the protagonist’s 100-page standup comedy routine, in which we hear a shockingly good shaggy dog story about a post-Apocalyptic Chicago ruled by flighted penguins.
So it sucks to say that this book is very much a mixed bag. It contains some of Levin’s best writing to date, and also the most frustrating/tedious sections of his career. At a certain point in the novel, Levin speaks directly to the reader and says, basically, that the book has gotten out of control and that it was only meant to be a spry, <200 pages. And at nearly 600 pages, Mount Chicago really has nothing to justify its own length. Often times I had to take a break from it because I was so bored.
The last 150 pages though, have some of my favorite sections in any book, ever, which is why this is 4 stars. Specifically I’m talking about the protagonist’s 100-page standup comedy routine, in which we hear a shockingly good shaggy dog story about a post-Apocalyptic Chicago ruled by flighted penguins.
July 11, 2022
This book is about sinkhole that opens up in Chicago and the struggles of Solly Goodman who's trying to write this novel and also struggles to sell his previous one. This author's style is repetitive and tiring. His previous novel Bubblegum featured a trans woman performer whose work involves removing her limbs. As a trans woman reader, I found the author's focus in his book on body modification as it relates to trans women to be unsettling and disturbing. This book does not have that kind of content and instead wrangles with autofiction -unfortunately Levin's attempts at autofictional asides are boring, indulgent, and immature. The opening scene is between the author's stand-in, and his wife and involves her giving him a blowjob. It seems like women do not really have much of a purpose in this book beyond that.
September 24, 2022
Loved Apter Schutz; didn't care much for Solly Gladman. Loved the first half of the novel; didn't care much for the second half. Loved the clever prose; didn't care much for the overly clever prose. Loved the comedy (when it worked); didn't care much for the unaffecting sincerity. Loved the idea of Gogol; didn't care much for the extended passages from Gogol's perspective. Loved the idea of a chapter told as a first-person voice-recording before a major book-ending event; didn't care much for over 50 pages of said voice-recording being an anticlimactic joke about a duck who wears pants because he gets incessant boners.
Overall enjoyable, but sprinkled with lots of things that should've been edited out. A pretty amazing 350-page novel is buried in here, if you have the courage to extract it.
Overall enjoyable, but sprinkled with lots of things that should've been edited out. A pretty amazing 350-page novel is buried in here, if you have the courage to extract it.
August 30, 2022
What the actual fuck did I just read??
January 18, 2024
This is a book I believe I'll be thinking about for months. Levin is so great at writing about little moments of life that every person can relate to--if not directly call their own experience--and let hang in the air, asking the reader to find the meaning of these moments, if the reader believes in such a thing as meaning, or just enjoy remembering, recollecting, experiencing their life in a piece of fiction so complicated it honors the murky reality of life.
I can't say that this book hit me the way "Bubblegum" did, but I can say that, even if the subject material wasn't as resonant, I love Levin's long sentences, his syntax, and the voices of Gladman and Apter. To be confused by Levin for a hundred pages is an absolute joy for me. I don't know very many writers who do that to me.
I can't say that this book hit me the way "Bubblegum" did, but I can say that, even if the subject material wasn't as resonant, I love Levin's long sentences, his syntax, and the voices of Gladman and Apter. To be confused by Levin for a hundred pages is an absolute joy for me. I don't know very many writers who do that to me.
December 30, 2022
4.5 stars. Incredible writing, hilarious and oftentimes taking a joke right up to the boundary between hilarity and "uh-oh" -- docked half a star by (probably unfairly) comparing this to The Instructions, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There were just a few areas where I sped through the text to get through it, but I was glad to read another Adam Levin novel with a shorter turnaround between Bubblegum and Mount Chicago than there was between The Instructions and Bubblegum.
January 24, 2023
An author being self-indulgent sounds like a criticism, but in my experience, it doesn't have to be. Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., is probably his most self-indulgent; no whim was left unsatisfied, yet it works somehow, it's his best, in my opinion. David Foster Wallace, another serial self-indulger, has varying success; some of it works so well, but he often goes too far. Postmodern authors are the most self-indulgent and self-pleased of all, which is why they're so controversial. Not everyone is up for the metafictional magic tricks they throw out, and even fewer will sit through the endless digressions they love so much.
Adam Levin's making a name for himself amongst those authors, not just because he's similarly self-indulgent, but because his work is very good and unique and moving. His first novel The Instructions was a blast that was compared incessantly to Infinite Jest but it is so much more readable. His second novel Bubblegum proved that he's no simple DFW clone by being--again--ultra-readable and emotional and addictive.
This book, however, sadly, is not what I'd call ultra-readable or addictive. It's on the wrong side of self-indulgent, as far as I'm concerned. So much of it seems like it was designed to be off-putting, like he took a page from Samuel Beckett's diarrhea-filled playbook and maybe a page from Pynchon's zany book of duck penises. Seriously, there's too much talk about diarrhea and duck penises and Louis CK and there are altogether too many shaggy dog stories that either go too far or not far enough.
There's a thread of anti-wokeness or at least anti-political correctness woven through here that's similarly off-putting. There's a section that talks about how hard it is for a white male author to get published in the current cultural climate, because everyone is interested in seeing perspectives other than that of white males. I don't think Levin is anti-woke in the way that Fox News is anti-woke, or that he's bemoaning his awful fate as a white male, but his willingness to step into this debate as a digression from the main story of his book, is just a little off-putting. The fridging of the protagonist's wife (an obvious stand-in for Levin's actual wife) in the first pages of the book feels like it was included as a middle finger to the awareness of fridging that's come up recently. It's like he's strewn nuggets of semi-anti-wokeness throughout the novel just for a little bit more edge.
I can forgive a lot in a book, however, if I am attached to the characters. I never grew attached to anyone in this book. There's Solomon Gladman, an author and professor who moonlights as a purposely schlocky comedian. There's Apter Schutz, a wunderkind who can do no wrong. And there's a ridiculous mayor. None of these gained my loyalty.
That's not to say there are no good parts. I really enjoyed the beginning. And I enjoyed the ending, which would have been very moving (rather than somewhat moving) had I developed a deeper bond with the characters.
Suffice it to say, this is my least favorite of Adam Levin's novels. But that's not to say I won't be excited when he releases another book. I know this guy's a great talent; he just missed the mark on this one for me.
Adam Levin's making a name for himself amongst those authors, not just because he's similarly self-indulgent, but because his work is very good and unique and moving. His first novel The Instructions was a blast that was compared incessantly to Infinite Jest but it is so much more readable. His second novel Bubblegum proved that he's no simple DFW clone by being--again--ultra-readable and emotional and addictive.
This book, however, sadly, is not what I'd call ultra-readable or addictive. It's on the wrong side of self-indulgent, as far as I'm concerned. So much of it seems like it was designed to be off-putting, like he took a page from Samuel Beckett's diarrhea-filled playbook and maybe a page from Pynchon's zany book of duck penises. Seriously, there's too much talk about diarrhea and duck penises and Louis CK and there are altogether too many shaggy dog stories that either go too far or not far enough.
There's a thread of anti-wokeness or at least anti-political correctness woven through here that's similarly off-putting. There's a section that talks about how hard it is for a white male author to get published in the current cultural climate, because everyone is interested in seeing perspectives other than that of white males. I don't think Levin is anti-woke in the way that Fox News is anti-woke, or that he's bemoaning his awful fate as a white male, but his willingness to step into this debate as a digression from the main story of his book, is just a little off-putting. The fridging of the protagonist's wife (an obvious stand-in for Levin's actual wife) in the first pages of the book feels like it was included as a middle finger to the awareness of fridging that's come up recently. It's like he's strewn nuggets of semi-anti-wokeness throughout the novel just for a little bit more edge.
I can forgive a lot in a book, however, if I am attached to the characters. I never grew attached to anyone in this book. There's Solomon Gladman, an author and professor who moonlights as a purposely schlocky comedian. There's Apter Schutz, a wunderkind who can do no wrong. And there's a ridiculous mayor. None of these gained my loyalty.
That's not to say there are no good parts. I really enjoyed the beginning. And I enjoyed the ending, which would have been very moving (rather than somewhat moving) had I developed a deeper bond with the characters.
Suffice it to say, this is my least favorite of Adam Levin's novels. But that's not to say I won't be excited when he releases another book. I know this guy's a great talent; he just missed the mark on this one for me.
November 16, 2022
Oh the smug self-satisfied superiority of the anti-woke author. There is of course no such thing as cancel culture, a reactionary coinage created by the right wing and eagerly promoted by the great liberalocracy first and foremost among whom is the literary establishment, but this book makes me wish there were so I could put in my bid for its cancellation. Though I was bracing myself for what I knew was coming from the moment I read the words "political correctness" on the jacket copy, still I read it at a nice clip for the first hundred-some pages, pulled along by the fluid, compelling writing. Then, soon after turning that first-hundred-page corner, the right-wing rants began. The writing still fluid, still compelling, sure, but now revealing itself to be in the service of an offensive and, sorry to tell anyone who thinks there's anything original to be found here, thoroughly shopworn series of rants against the efforts especially by young people to counter and beat back all that is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and yes, Zionist, in the culture. Ho hum. How dull, how predictable this sort of writer is. Woe is he! How downtrodden the straight white male. How clever it is to expose this. Oy gevalt.
And yep I'm Jewish. And yep I'm anti-Zionist (which no is not synonymous with anti-Semitic, again, how tired, how weak, how easily disproven is such an assertion), and anti-racist, and lesbian to boot, in other words ripe for the cheap satirizing indulged here. I'm also 68 years old, impressed with and proud of the woke (! yes I said it!) young people Levin and other such writers skewer. How wearying is this kind of fiction--whose constant publication, critical lauds, adulatory blurbs, award nominations belie its mewling besieged self-pitying posture--and how well it proves that this is the dominant strain against which the rest of us have every reason to push.
I briefly considered reading on after these initial parodic publishing-industry and campus scenes in the early 100s pages in the faint hope the novel would take a different, dare I say leftward, turn. But such a hope would be foolhardy since the novel's clearly enunciated political bent is so evidently the engine that will henceforth drive it. Also, according to the excellent rule to which I subscribe about when it's okay to give up on a book (up to age 50 you have to read at least twice as many pages as your age before you can stop, and after age 50 you only have to read half as many pages as your age before you can stop), I gave this book way way more pages, way way more chances, than I should have.
Oh, by the way, here's a bonus: women barely exist here, at least in these first 100+ pages that I read before I gave up in disgust. Where there are women characters, they are depicted only in their relation to the male protagonists. Calling Allison Bechdel!
And yep I'm Jewish. And yep I'm anti-Zionist (which no is not synonymous with anti-Semitic, again, how tired, how weak, how easily disproven is such an assertion), and anti-racist, and lesbian to boot, in other words ripe for the cheap satirizing indulged here. I'm also 68 years old, impressed with and proud of the woke (! yes I said it!) young people Levin and other such writers skewer. How wearying is this kind of fiction--whose constant publication, critical lauds, adulatory blurbs, award nominations belie its mewling besieged self-pitying posture--and how well it proves that this is the dominant strain against which the rest of us have every reason to push.
I briefly considered reading on after these initial parodic publishing-industry and campus scenes in the early 100s pages in the faint hope the novel would take a different, dare I say leftward, turn. But such a hope would be foolhardy since the novel's clearly enunciated political bent is so evidently the engine that will henceforth drive it. Also, according to the excellent rule to which I subscribe about when it's okay to give up on a book (up to age 50 you have to read at least twice as many pages as your age before you can stop, and after age 50 you only have to read half as many pages as your age before you can stop), I gave this book way way more pages, way way more chances, than I should have.
Oh, by the way, here's a bonus: women barely exist here, at least in these first 100+ pages that I read before I gave up in disgust. Where there are women characters, they are depicted only in their relation to the male protagonists. Calling Allison Bechdel!
November 12, 2024
I had a lot of fun with Levin’s Bubblegum last year and was excited to read this one, so I’m sad to say that it didn’t work nearly as well.
Levin’s voice is, by design, pretty annoying. He inhabits these neurotic, self-absorbed characters and lets them digress ad nauseum, sometimes in chapters that derail the entire book and run for almost 100 pages at a time (or more? I wasn’t counting). This approach is great for someone like me who doesn’t put much stock in the idea of plot and enjoys spending time in the heads of rambling weirdos, so I accepted these sprawling digressions with the same enthusiasm I felt when they popped up in Bubblegum. Levin is frequently hilarious, so it’s usually fun to follow his stream of consciousness bullshit no matter where it goes.
But at a certain point in Mount Chicago, I couldn’t help but wonder if the book had been plotted or outlined at all. There are so many extended sections that don’t amount to much, and when the five (five!!) narrative perspectives start coming together after 350 pages, the results aren’t really worth the time it takes to get there. By the time I realized how the book was about to end, I almost felt… not cheated, but definitely jerked around. Again, I have no interest in plot, but I would at least prefer a book to wrap up in a way that makes me feel that the majority of what I just read has a point.
I’m aware that most of my complaints are features, not bugs, to Levin fans, but for some reason they started to bug me in this one. There’s also a very chunky chapter that takes place on a college campus and concerns itself with cancel culture, gender identity, victimhood politics, and such, and this whole section felt very tacky and disingenuous, to say the least. It didn’t quite ruin the book for me, but it did make me wonder what the author was really trying to say, and I hope he’s not as out of touch as that chapter made him sound.
Despite all of the above, I enjoyed reading this on a page-by-page basis. I laughed a lot, I blew through hundreds of pages at a time, and even if I found it to be a mess, it was never a boring mess, so I’m glad to have read it. I just wish it felt more purposeful in the end.
Levin’s voice is, by design, pretty annoying. He inhabits these neurotic, self-absorbed characters and lets them digress ad nauseum, sometimes in chapters that derail the entire book and run for almost 100 pages at a time (or more? I wasn’t counting). This approach is great for someone like me who doesn’t put much stock in the idea of plot and enjoys spending time in the heads of rambling weirdos, so I accepted these sprawling digressions with the same enthusiasm I felt when they popped up in Bubblegum. Levin is frequently hilarious, so it’s usually fun to follow his stream of consciousness bullshit no matter where it goes.
But at a certain point in Mount Chicago, I couldn’t help but wonder if the book had been plotted or outlined at all. There are so many extended sections that don’t amount to much, and when the five (five!!) narrative perspectives start coming together after 350 pages, the results aren’t really worth the time it takes to get there. By the time I realized how the book was about to end, I almost felt… not cheated, but definitely jerked around. Again, I have no interest in plot, but I would at least prefer a book to wrap up in a way that makes me feel that the majority of what I just read has a point.
I’m aware that most of my complaints are features, not bugs, to Levin fans, but for some reason they started to bug me in this one. There’s also a very chunky chapter that takes place on a college campus and concerns itself with cancel culture, gender identity, victimhood politics, and such, and this whole section felt very tacky and disingenuous, to say the least. It didn’t quite ruin the book for me, but it did make me wonder what the author was really trying to say, and I hope he’s not as out of touch as that chapter made him sound.
Despite all of the above, I enjoyed reading this on a page-by-page basis. I laughed a lot, I blew through hundreds of pages at a time, and even if I found it to be a mess, it was never a boring mess, so I’m glad to have read it. I just wish it felt more purposeful in the end.
September 15, 2022
The comparisons to David Foster Wallace make sense, and are a major reason for my complaints and praise for this novel. At times, Levin’s storytelling really shines with well-woven character histories and emotion, but at others, it really seems to fall flat in an attempt at literary brilliance that seems overly pretentious.
What Levin masters here is the autobiographical aspect that his two protagonists represent. It’s truly unique, smart, and creative. It’s my main takeaway from this novel, and it redeems the book from the fact that nothing much happens within these 600 pages—something many novels, especially longer ones, can’t recover from. Still, Levin himself complains that this book may have been too long, and I can’t help but to agree a little bit.
What Levin masters here is the autobiographical aspect that his two protagonists represent. It’s truly unique, smart, and creative. It’s my main takeaway from this novel, and it redeems the book from the fact that nothing much happens within these 600 pages—something many novels, especially longer ones, can’t recover from. Still, Levin himself complains that this book may have been too long, and I can’t help but to agree a little bit.
January 6, 2024
Mount Chicago, or, a masterclass in how to subvert a reader's expectations. With each successive novel of his I read, I see a refinement in both his authorial voice - principally identified by what I would tentatively call "neurotic sincerity" - and the object(s) of his fixation. Every time I encounter his world, he presents a situation that could not be more grandiose - a forthcoming Messiah, a world without the Internet, an urban apocalypse - and each time, he bypasses the thrill-ride narrative he's blueprinted and teased and instead bores his way into the human, and mundane. What greater reflection of reality could one possibly ask for?
January 9, 2023
(audible)
I am NOT recommending this book, out of a well-founded fear that most readers would hate it with all their hearts. I lerved it. By that I mean I loved it, liked it, and at times hated it. But the hating almost always gave way to a real respect for this author. Levin is beyond caring, maybe even wants his readers to feel stuck in a storyline or joke that goes on and on and that you keep thinking will end. A duck joke without a memorable punchline, poop descriptions that do NOT end. And yet, it is hilarious, profound, and heartbreaking.
I am NOT recommending this book, out of a well-founded fear that most readers would hate it with all their hearts. I lerved it. By that I mean I loved it, liked it, and at times hated it. But the hating almost always gave way to a real respect for this author. Levin is beyond caring, maybe even wants his readers to feel stuck in a storyline or joke that goes on and on and that you keep thinking will end. A duck joke without a memorable punchline, poop descriptions that do NOT end. And yet, it is hilarious, profound, and heartbreaking.
September 29, 2022
I found this book to be a confusing and often tedious collection of stream of consciousness narratives. I was fairly interested in what happened to Apter and to Gladman, but slogging through pages (and pages) of asides, fantasies, drug trips, intense descriptions of defecating and excruciating details of psychotherapy approaches that may or may not be effective, was NOT worth finding out what happened to them.
September 25, 2023
Would have loved to have loved it more, but this one didn't grab me nearly as hard as Bubblegum or The Instructions. My biggest gripe with it is a seeming lack of purpose, which I do think is intentional. Adam Levin does a great job at writing larger than life characters that more or less are going about their business. But in this particular case, maybe I just haven't been in the right headspace for it, but several times I found myself wanting him to just get on with it. But then again that's what I knew I was getting into, and I did definitely enjoy it despite a few bits that dragged. One of the largest problems I think was just that it wasn't as punchy with it's story as The Instructions and not as personal and human as Bubblegum. He's such a strong writer and you can absolutely bet the farm that I will be picking up any and all books he continues to write going forward, but as far as my interest and taste, this is going to have to rest at a 7/10.
April 1, 2024
First five star book in awhile. This book is irreverent and funny, self-conscious, and nods to many of my favorite authors and books such a DeLillo, Pynchon and Toole. I've recommended this to many friends and see myself reading it again.
August 18, 2025
Funny, sad, so Chicago. A little long towards the end but Adam Levin is quite the wordsmith.
February 22, 2023
Heerlijk proza dat ons meeneemt in de wereld van een /de schrijver, zijn fan en zijn parkiet. Hoe bepaalt de parkiet wie de dominante is in het duo met zijn/haar baas? Hoe niet/leven na massaal verlies? Maakt een goede therapeut zijn ongelukkig? Enz. Een gul boek.
January 8, 2026
“The head was transporting. His unspeakable flare-up seemed at first to diminish, and shortly thereafter to completely disappear. His wife left to brush her teeth when it was over, and Gladman lay on the bed for a minute, a couple of minutes, pain-free, grinning, and—-what was this? Hungry. Hungry for potatoes and bacon and syrup, hungry for an omelet, ready to brunch. Looking forward not only to eating some brunch, but also to the having eaten of some brunch. To fighting off the drowsy after-brunch bloat via striding with his family through his favorite museum on this gray and chilly November Sunday. To the warm, balanced lighting there, the thick, scentless air, and especially the noise. That cottony noise of humans in motion trying not to make noise. He loved that noise. The thousands of shoe soles padding on the hardwood, occasionally squeaking. The thousands of pantlegs rubbing each other, some of them swooshing. The in- and advertent cracking of knee joints. The murmured comments, the half-swallowed laughter, the sibilant whispers of nervous parents sharply admonishing handsy toddlers. All of it aggregating, averaging out, then fizzing through the ear canals, into the brain, relaxing the nerves, aiding digestion.
Did he really love all that enumerated noise, though? Was thick air-was any air—ever truly scentless? Perhaps the endorphins released by his jizzing had made the coming outing seem overly rosy. He paused to consider the possibility, but owing, perhaps, to those same endorphins, dismissed it just as quickly, fell back into reverie.”
“Great art, Gladman thought, was always certain of something. In fact, that was the point of it: to be great while being certain, which for people was impossible.”
“Moreover, though: affection. Total Jew was an expression of affection. He thought "total Jew" with affection in his heart. In thinking "total Jew," he was giving a compliment, however silently, and when he looked at Apter and thought "total Jew," he did so with a smile on his face, a certain kind of a warm and friendly but also a knowing and murderous smile, which hed only recently learned how to smile by observing guess who. That's right. Apter Schutz.”
“You had to squint both eyes the same amount at the start, but then one of them—the one on the side that you were leaning toward, which was the same side the person you were smiling at was standing on—you unsquinted it right in the middle of the smile, hiked its corresponding eyebrow and lip corner, too. The effect was: We both know I could have you killed, but since we both know Ill never have you killed, isn't the reminder I could have you killed very flattering for both of us? Like:
Aren't we very cute together, heterosexually?”
“These were, after all, the inventors of the gray area, the Jews. Or if not the inventors, then the ones who named it. Or if not the ones who named it, the ones who named it most often, who described it the best. What area couldn't a Jew turn gray? What gray area of any prominence hadn't the Jews been the first to turn gray? They crucified Jesus, which, historically speaking, was probably the shittiest thing anyone ever did to anyone else ever, but, same time, and speaking just as historically, if Jesus hadn't died on the cross, there wouldn't be any Christians, just a bunch of Greek or Roman pedophiles everywhere. Maybe Arabian ones, too, because could there be any Muslims without there first being Christians spreading the idea of just one God? A lot of people didn't think so, the mayor had heard, and the mayor was among them. So any time you said, “The Jews murdered Jesus,” you might as well have said, “The Jews started Christianity,” which might as well mean, “The Jews started Islam.” And three ways vice versa. All those statements, as far as the mayor was concerned, were equally true. That was gray as it got.
And what it was with the Jews was the Jews were raised knowing this right from the beginning. “We're Christ-killers, which would normally mean we were the shittiest people, but since our Christ-killing has ended up leading to the salvation of so many hundreds of millions of souls, not to mention preventing countless little Greco-Roman boys from getting sexually violated in baths and saunas, how shitty can a people like us really be? Not so fucken shitty, after all, looks like.” And if that's where you're starting from, a young Jewish schoolkid, having to contend with the all-time grayest of the grayest areas, you're just a lot more likely than the average jagoff—than even, really, the above-average jagoff—to end up becoming a genius at articulating all the right words together. Which were the most important things to be able to articulate. Especially of lately.”
“He met any number of sharp, energetic, analytical people who seemed to earnestly wish to lessen their suffering and the suffering of others. Who wanted to hear and discuss the best ways to do that, then act. But he encountered plenty of awful people, as well. Overwrought people who seemed to want to suffer, to want to get credit for having suffered, to be invested in their suffering, in establishing the inferiority of the suffering of others to their own. And then there were those people who, more often than not, proudly called themselves allies, people who claimed to suffer by proxy, to suffer from the shame of living in a world that privileged them and privileged those like them at the cost of others suffering.”
“Which wasn't to say he didn't hate that the suffering of two of his clients had been so terrible as to drive them to suicide, but rather that, given how terrible their suffering had been, suicide seemed like a reasonable solution. The tragedy was the suffering, the suicide the end of it. The tragedy the cause, not the effect.
Or maybe the effect was also a tragedy, but certainly not one as great as the cause.”
““I empathized, above all, with her desire to kill herself. Her life was pain with occasional breaks she was expected to understand as pleasure. If I had her life, I’d have done the same thing. I believe I'd have done it much earlier; actually.””
““…Whether were aware of it or not, we are all shaping one another's behavior all the time—we couldn't stop it we tried—and so we are all shaped by one another's behavior all the time.
And I mean all the time. Even when were alone.
Even when we are not among others, the historical shaping of our behavior by others shapes our behavior.
And it isn't just others who shape it, either. It's everything in our immediate contexts, and every context in which we have ever been.
Others are only a part of our contexts.
Our behavior is governed by our contexts: our immediate context and our historical contexts. (That's historical with a lower-case h, by the way: our historical contexts are the immediate contexts in which we have historically been.)
Furthermore, if we agree to include, under the rubric of context, our genetic predispositions and basic biological imperatives-to consume nutrients, to sleep, to breathe air, to remain hydrated, and, yes, to be social—then it can safely be said that we are governed exclusively by our contexts.
That is Behaviorism. We are as we do, and everything we do is shaped by context, and everything we do shapes our context.””
““As I've said a couple of times already: we are as we do. Which also means: we are not as we don't. Thus, those who are depressed are, simply, those who engage in depressive behavior. Those who are not depressed are, no less simply, those who do not engage in depressive behavior.””
“In sum, the focus of OAP was not on helping the client delve ever deeper into the stories the client told to others and herself about herself, but on helping the client more effectively manipulate and be manipulated by her contexts in more predictable/desirable ways, which, as far as story-telling went, entailed the client's climbing out from the depths of her long-arc narratives, and observing and more precisely describing her more immediate surroundings and surfaces.”
“The less he cared about his clients, the better he got at OAP and STET. The better he got at OAP and STET, the less pleasure he derived from helping people. The less pleasure he derived from helping people, the less pleasure he derived from living in general. The less pleasure he derived from living in general, the less motivation he had to help people. The less motivation he had to help people, the less inclined he became to pretend he thought their larger narratives were important. The less inclined he became to pretend he thought the larger narratives of others were important, the less capable he became of believing his own larger narrative was important to others, or even to, for that matter, himself.”
“Had he truly, as he had begun to suspect, broken up with Lindsay Biss in so sudden and cold and cruel a manner because his "worldview" had been scrambled by too much Behaviorism, or had he done so because he, like every other deluded schmuck on Earth, couldn't help but think of himself—despite his faith in Behaviorism—as living out a narrative that—in even greater spite of his faith in Behaviorism—he couldn't help but believe that (by living) he at least partly authored, and that, within this narrative (comprised of a series of anecdotes, the fifth of which he was presently living/authoring), he could not remain (as he wished to remain) an empathetic/likable protagonist if he stopped working as a therapist unless his working as a therapist was itself convincingly ruining his life/protagonism/capacity-to-be-empathized-with, and his worldview had been so scrambled by Behaviorism as to render him incapable of being anything other than sudden and cold and cruel to Lindsay Biss when he broke up with her fit the bill well and conveniently enough?”
“It was, Mamet said, the kind of schlock schlockmeisters had always aspired to jizz down the throats and all over the faces of “the members (as it were)” of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”
“How that portion of the basin would be dealt with in the future was a question for the future that would not be decided till more of the future became some of the past.”
“It was a really pleasant moment, that little exchange there. The kind that you hoped you'd remember while you died, if how you died was in a bed, slowly.”
“The difference between thinking about trying to kill yourself and actually trying to kill yourself was often, she said, just a matter of circumstance and opportunity, like did you have a rope handy or a gun or pills or a razor while you were ideating suicidally or did you not have such suicide-activating items handy? That was often it: all that made the difference.
And so suicidal ideation survivors basically were suicide attempt survivors, the vlogger insisted. A suicidal ideation survivor, the vlogger insisted, was a kind of suicide attempt survivor who was unable to follow through on the attempt not because they wouldn't have attempted suicide if they'd had the opportunity, but because they hadn't had the opportunity.”
“Might even be that the measure of the strength of a person's suicidal ideations was how willing that person was to look like a pussy by admitting to them.”
““Doing a thing you're good at ...it's a pleasure.
I'm sure you know that. A thing you're great at? That much more of a pleasure. Only follows, right?””
““Quick sidebar, actually: in Russian, this name, Akaky Aka-kiyevich, it means something along the lines of like Doodoo Poopoo, or more like, I guess, Doodoo son of Poopoo. Poopoos son, Doodoo. That kind of thing.””
“You are more afraid of boredom than death. You are more afraid of pain than death. More afraid of annoyance than death. You are more afraid of inconvenience than death. You aren't afraid of death in the least!”
“This wild animal, he thought... This thing that can fly, he thought... It's standing on you, staring at you. No one's coercing it into doing either thing, and that has to mean... It wants to stand on you. It wants! It is able to want, it wants, and what it wants is to more closely see you. While over there in its cage, it found you compelling, knew you weren't a threat, and so it got closer. And maybe you're compelling, and you're surely not a threat, but how can it know that? How can it know you mean it no harm? Why should it know that? It weighs what? Thirty grams? You weigh sixty-some kilograms. You are over two thousand times larger than her. She should fear you, shouldn't she? Yes. She should. She should clock you as dangerous— You’d clock you as dangerous, if you were her. Things like you—you eat things like her. That's what you'd think, if you were her. So maybe she's stupid. Either she's stupid, or she knows something you don't know; something you don't even know how to know, and so maybe you're stupid. Or have been stupid. And maybe you'd rather be. Yes. No maybes about it. That's what you'd prefer. You'd prefer to be stupid. To have been stupid. You'd prefer that she know how to know a thing that you don't. How to know things that you don't. You'd prefer that she know-and if she, then who else? What else? everyone? every animal?... You'd prefer to believe the world to be even more complicated than you've always believed the world to be. You've always preferred to believe the world to be even more complicated than you've always believed the world to be. And you can. So you will. Now you'll believe it. It's a pleasure to believe it. It's a pleasure to believe she wants to be here.”
“He had to do all of that and he had to be-and, it should be said, wanted to be just as any conscientious storyteller has to be and wants to be, but especially when the one-person audience for the story he's telling is an all-time master storyteller himself, and even more especially when that all-time master storyteller's storytelling sensibilities are precisely the storytelling sensibilities the conscientious storyteller has spent his entire storytelling life attempting to make his own)—engaging, if not downright entertaining.”
“You could tell that Cobain was in great pain, that he was completely hopeless about the pain, completely unable to imagine that anyone could help him get beyond the pain, and so he wasn't someone who'd cry for help. He was someone who hadn't seen any point in crying for help in a very long time, and who'd looked forward to dying for years and years, and he'd only just found the energy to kill himself. Solly told his friends that he believed they knew it, too, knew it just as well as he did, but that they didn't want to know that they knew it, they didn't want to know because they loved Cobain's voice as much as Solly did, and they didn't want to know that what they loved would have been less lovable or even maybe unlovable if the person it originated from wasn't suffering enormously. They didn't want to know that the voice would be a less stunningly beautiful voice if Cobain didn't suffer enormously, so they lied to themselves, or told themselves stories about what could and couldn't be known in order not to have to feel bad about delighting in an outcome of enormous human suffering.”
“One time-the first time, actually—I thought I was a character in either a slightly fictionalized memoir, or a highly autobiographical novel. I couldn't decide if the author was me, or one of my friends, but everything was so stylized and perfect and in its right place—Tess's laugh, Jay's devil's lock, the freckles on the shoulders of our other friend Hannah, the touch of green I found in my eyes in the mirror, Stephen Perkins's drumming on Jane's Addiction's “Three Days”, even the darkness of the sudden realization I had that Kurt Vonnegut and Perry Farrell, my favorite writer at the time and my favorite singer, both had mothers who'd killed themselves—it was all so ordered and full of good sense and free of rough edges, I just couldn't imagine that we weren't art. Free will, which I'd believed in at the time, and which I'd continue to believe in for a couple more years—suddenly, it just seemed really overrated. And that was great, too.”
“More than that, though, I guess: I don't think lifes a joke.
I never have. A lot of times it's very funny, it's chockful of jokes, but that doesn't make it a joke itself. I mean, it's got plenty of music in it, too, plenty of songs, plenty of singing-does that mean it's a musical?
I say no. I do not think that life is a musical.
I think what it is, it's more a shaggy dog story. A bunch of patterns you can almost make out that seem like they're about to come together to reveal each other fully and form a larger pattern giving rise to a kind of totality of meaning, and then they do come together, but in doing so—in coming together—they don't form a larger pattern, or more fully reveal one another. In fact they further obscure and sometimes even dissolve one another. And maybe they weren't ever there, you think. Maybe those patterns weren't ever there. Maybe you imposed them.”
“The wing hurts so much it's like there's more of the pain
than there is of the wing.
It's like there's more of the pain than there is of him.
It's less like it's the pain of the shivering duckling and more like he's the shivering duckling of the pain…”
Did he really love all that enumerated noise, though? Was thick air-was any air—ever truly scentless? Perhaps the endorphins released by his jizzing had made the coming outing seem overly rosy. He paused to consider the possibility, but owing, perhaps, to those same endorphins, dismissed it just as quickly, fell back into reverie.”
“Great art, Gladman thought, was always certain of something. In fact, that was the point of it: to be great while being certain, which for people was impossible.”
“Moreover, though: affection. Total Jew was an expression of affection. He thought "total Jew" with affection in his heart. In thinking "total Jew," he was giving a compliment, however silently, and when he looked at Apter and thought "total Jew," he did so with a smile on his face, a certain kind of a warm and friendly but also a knowing and murderous smile, which hed only recently learned how to smile by observing guess who. That's right. Apter Schutz.”
“You had to squint both eyes the same amount at the start, but then one of them—the one on the side that you were leaning toward, which was the same side the person you were smiling at was standing on—you unsquinted it right in the middle of the smile, hiked its corresponding eyebrow and lip corner, too. The effect was: We both know I could have you killed, but since we both know Ill never have you killed, isn't the reminder I could have you killed very flattering for both of us? Like:
Aren't we very cute together, heterosexually?”
“These were, after all, the inventors of the gray area, the Jews. Or if not the inventors, then the ones who named it. Or if not the ones who named it, the ones who named it most often, who described it the best. What area couldn't a Jew turn gray? What gray area of any prominence hadn't the Jews been the first to turn gray? They crucified Jesus, which, historically speaking, was probably the shittiest thing anyone ever did to anyone else ever, but, same time, and speaking just as historically, if Jesus hadn't died on the cross, there wouldn't be any Christians, just a bunch of Greek or Roman pedophiles everywhere. Maybe Arabian ones, too, because could there be any Muslims without there first being Christians spreading the idea of just one God? A lot of people didn't think so, the mayor had heard, and the mayor was among them. So any time you said, “The Jews murdered Jesus,” you might as well have said, “The Jews started Christianity,” which might as well mean, “The Jews started Islam.” And three ways vice versa. All those statements, as far as the mayor was concerned, were equally true. That was gray as it got.
And what it was with the Jews was the Jews were raised knowing this right from the beginning. “We're Christ-killers, which would normally mean we were the shittiest people, but since our Christ-killing has ended up leading to the salvation of so many hundreds of millions of souls, not to mention preventing countless little Greco-Roman boys from getting sexually violated in baths and saunas, how shitty can a people like us really be? Not so fucken shitty, after all, looks like.” And if that's where you're starting from, a young Jewish schoolkid, having to contend with the all-time grayest of the grayest areas, you're just a lot more likely than the average jagoff—than even, really, the above-average jagoff—to end up becoming a genius at articulating all the right words together. Which were the most important things to be able to articulate. Especially of lately.”
“He met any number of sharp, energetic, analytical people who seemed to earnestly wish to lessen their suffering and the suffering of others. Who wanted to hear and discuss the best ways to do that, then act. But he encountered plenty of awful people, as well. Overwrought people who seemed to want to suffer, to want to get credit for having suffered, to be invested in their suffering, in establishing the inferiority of the suffering of others to their own. And then there were those people who, more often than not, proudly called themselves allies, people who claimed to suffer by proxy, to suffer from the shame of living in a world that privileged them and privileged those like them at the cost of others suffering.”
“Which wasn't to say he didn't hate that the suffering of two of his clients had been so terrible as to drive them to suicide, but rather that, given how terrible their suffering had been, suicide seemed like a reasonable solution. The tragedy was the suffering, the suicide the end of it. The tragedy the cause, not the effect.
Or maybe the effect was also a tragedy, but certainly not one as great as the cause.”
““I empathized, above all, with her desire to kill herself. Her life was pain with occasional breaks she was expected to understand as pleasure. If I had her life, I’d have done the same thing. I believe I'd have done it much earlier; actually.””
““…Whether were aware of it or not, we are all shaping one another's behavior all the time—we couldn't stop it we tried—and so we are all shaped by one another's behavior all the time.
And I mean all the time. Even when were alone.
Even when we are not among others, the historical shaping of our behavior by others shapes our behavior.
And it isn't just others who shape it, either. It's everything in our immediate contexts, and every context in which we have ever been.
Others are only a part of our contexts.
Our behavior is governed by our contexts: our immediate context and our historical contexts. (That's historical with a lower-case h, by the way: our historical contexts are the immediate contexts in which we have historically been.)
Furthermore, if we agree to include, under the rubric of context, our genetic predispositions and basic biological imperatives-to consume nutrients, to sleep, to breathe air, to remain hydrated, and, yes, to be social—then it can safely be said that we are governed exclusively by our contexts.
That is Behaviorism. We are as we do, and everything we do is shaped by context, and everything we do shapes our context.””
““As I've said a couple of times already: we are as we do. Which also means: we are not as we don't. Thus, those who are depressed are, simply, those who engage in depressive behavior. Those who are not depressed are, no less simply, those who do not engage in depressive behavior.””
“In sum, the focus of OAP was not on helping the client delve ever deeper into the stories the client told to others and herself about herself, but on helping the client more effectively manipulate and be manipulated by her contexts in more predictable/desirable ways, which, as far as story-telling went, entailed the client's climbing out from the depths of her long-arc narratives, and observing and more precisely describing her more immediate surroundings and surfaces.”
“The less he cared about his clients, the better he got at OAP and STET. The better he got at OAP and STET, the less pleasure he derived from helping people. The less pleasure he derived from helping people, the less pleasure he derived from living in general. The less pleasure he derived from living in general, the less motivation he had to help people. The less motivation he had to help people, the less inclined he became to pretend he thought their larger narratives were important. The less inclined he became to pretend he thought the larger narratives of others were important, the less capable he became of believing his own larger narrative was important to others, or even to, for that matter, himself.”
“Had he truly, as he had begun to suspect, broken up with Lindsay Biss in so sudden and cold and cruel a manner because his "worldview" had been scrambled by too much Behaviorism, or had he done so because he, like every other deluded schmuck on Earth, couldn't help but think of himself—despite his faith in Behaviorism—as living out a narrative that—in even greater spite of his faith in Behaviorism—he couldn't help but believe that (by living) he at least partly authored, and that, within this narrative (comprised of a series of anecdotes, the fifth of which he was presently living/authoring), he could not remain (as he wished to remain) an empathetic/likable protagonist if he stopped working as a therapist unless his working as a therapist was itself convincingly ruining his life/protagonism/capacity-to-be-empathized-with, and his worldview had been so scrambled by Behaviorism as to render him incapable of being anything other than sudden and cold and cruel to Lindsay Biss when he broke up with her fit the bill well and conveniently enough?”
“It was, Mamet said, the kind of schlock schlockmeisters had always aspired to jizz down the throats and all over the faces of “the members (as it were)” of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”
“How that portion of the basin would be dealt with in the future was a question for the future that would not be decided till more of the future became some of the past.”
“It was a really pleasant moment, that little exchange there. The kind that you hoped you'd remember while you died, if how you died was in a bed, slowly.”
“The difference between thinking about trying to kill yourself and actually trying to kill yourself was often, she said, just a matter of circumstance and opportunity, like did you have a rope handy or a gun or pills or a razor while you were ideating suicidally or did you not have such suicide-activating items handy? That was often it: all that made the difference.
And so suicidal ideation survivors basically were suicide attempt survivors, the vlogger insisted. A suicidal ideation survivor, the vlogger insisted, was a kind of suicide attempt survivor who was unable to follow through on the attempt not because they wouldn't have attempted suicide if they'd had the opportunity, but because they hadn't had the opportunity.”
“Might even be that the measure of the strength of a person's suicidal ideations was how willing that person was to look like a pussy by admitting to them.”
““Doing a thing you're good at ...it's a pleasure.
I'm sure you know that. A thing you're great at? That much more of a pleasure. Only follows, right?””
““Quick sidebar, actually: in Russian, this name, Akaky Aka-kiyevich, it means something along the lines of like Doodoo Poopoo, or more like, I guess, Doodoo son of Poopoo. Poopoos son, Doodoo. That kind of thing.””
“You are more afraid of boredom than death. You are more afraid of pain than death. More afraid of annoyance than death. You are more afraid of inconvenience than death. You aren't afraid of death in the least!”
“This wild animal, he thought... This thing that can fly, he thought... It's standing on you, staring at you. No one's coercing it into doing either thing, and that has to mean... It wants to stand on you. It wants! It is able to want, it wants, and what it wants is to more closely see you. While over there in its cage, it found you compelling, knew you weren't a threat, and so it got closer. And maybe you're compelling, and you're surely not a threat, but how can it know that? How can it know you mean it no harm? Why should it know that? It weighs what? Thirty grams? You weigh sixty-some kilograms. You are over two thousand times larger than her. She should fear you, shouldn't she? Yes. She should. She should clock you as dangerous— You’d clock you as dangerous, if you were her. Things like you—you eat things like her. That's what you'd think, if you were her. So maybe she's stupid. Either she's stupid, or she knows something you don't know; something you don't even know how to know, and so maybe you're stupid. Or have been stupid. And maybe you'd rather be. Yes. No maybes about it. That's what you'd prefer. You'd prefer to be stupid. To have been stupid. You'd prefer that she know how to know a thing that you don't. How to know things that you don't. You'd prefer that she know-and if she, then who else? What else? everyone? every animal?... You'd prefer to believe the world to be even more complicated than you've always believed the world to be. You've always preferred to believe the world to be even more complicated than you've always believed the world to be. And you can. So you will. Now you'll believe it. It's a pleasure to believe it. It's a pleasure to believe she wants to be here.”
“He had to do all of that and he had to be-and, it should be said, wanted to be just as any conscientious storyteller has to be and wants to be, but especially when the one-person audience for the story he's telling is an all-time master storyteller himself, and even more especially when that all-time master storyteller's storytelling sensibilities are precisely the storytelling sensibilities the conscientious storyteller has spent his entire storytelling life attempting to make his own)—engaging, if not downright entertaining.”
“You could tell that Cobain was in great pain, that he was completely hopeless about the pain, completely unable to imagine that anyone could help him get beyond the pain, and so he wasn't someone who'd cry for help. He was someone who hadn't seen any point in crying for help in a very long time, and who'd looked forward to dying for years and years, and he'd only just found the energy to kill himself. Solly told his friends that he believed they knew it, too, knew it just as well as he did, but that they didn't want to know that they knew it, they didn't want to know because they loved Cobain's voice as much as Solly did, and they didn't want to know that what they loved would have been less lovable or even maybe unlovable if the person it originated from wasn't suffering enormously. They didn't want to know that the voice would be a less stunningly beautiful voice if Cobain didn't suffer enormously, so they lied to themselves, or told themselves stories about what could and couldn't be known in order not to have to feel bad about delighting in an outcome of enormous human suffering.”
“One time-the first time, actually—I thought I was a character in either a slightly fictionalized memoir, or a highly autobiographical novel. I couldn't decide if the author was me, or one of my friends, but everything was so stylized and perfect and in its right place—Tess's laugh, Jay's devil's lock, the freckles on the shoulders of our other friend Hannah, the touch of green I found in my eyes in the mirror, Stephen Perkins's drumming on Jane's Addiction's “Three Days”, even the darkness of the sudden realization I had that Kurt Vonnegut and Perry Farrell, my favorite writer at the time and my favorite singer, both had mothers who'd killed themselves—it was all so ordered and full of good sense and free of rough edges, I just couldn't imagine that we weren't art. Free will, which I'd believed in at the time, and which I'd continue to believe in for a couple more years—suddenly, it just seemed really overrated. And that was great, too.”
“More than that, though, I guess: I don't think lifes a joke.
I never have. A lot of times it's very funny, it's chockful of jokes, but that doesn't make it a joke itself. I mean, it's got plenty of music in it, too, plenty of songs, plenty of singing-does that mean it's a musical?
I say no. I do not think that life is a musical.
I think what it is, it's more a shaggy dog story. A bunch of patterns you can almost make out that seem like they're about to come together to reveal each other fully and form a larger pattern giving rise to a kind of totality of meaning, and then they do come together, but in doing so—in coming together—they don't form a larger pattern, or more fully reveal one another. In fact they further obscure and sometimes even dissolve one another. And maybe they weren't ever there, you think. Maybe those patterns weren't ever there. Maybe you imposed them.”
“The wing hurts so much it's like there's more of the pain
than there is of the wing.
It's like there's more of the pain than there is of him.
It's less like it's the pain of the shivering duckling and more like he's the shivering duckling of the pain…”
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