Review by New York Times Review
WHO better to review a 1,000-page Jewish book that comes out in the fall than the author of an 800-page Jewish book that came out in the spring? Adam Levin's first novel, "The Instructions," appears a summer after my own novel "Witz," whose title translates to "joke," though it's no laughing matter: it's about the Last Jew in the World. And did you hear the one about Chaim, who was stranded on a desert island? When the rescuers finally arrived they found he'd built two fully equipped synagogues out of palm trunks and homemade rope. Curious, they asked him, "Why two?" Chaim answered, "One I pray in, the other I'll never step foot in." In the spirit of that joke, consider one of our books the Jewish novel you'll never begin and the other the Jewish novel you'll never finish. "The Instructions" purports to be a document called "The Instructions " word-processed by one Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, then "translated and retranslated from the Hebrew and the English by Eliyahu of Brooklyn and Emmanuel Liebman," before being published by McSweeney's in two sections: "The Side of Damage" and "The Gurionic War." This fat tablet is partly a theologico-political tract, and mostly a chronicle of four days in the life of a junior high schooler in suburban Illinois. Gurion, master of the portentous name, is a misbehaved 10-year-old, expelled from various Chicago-area yeshivas and now condemned to an experimental disciplinary program at Aptakisic Junior High referred to as the Cage. Oppressed by a one-handed Australian detention monitor named Victor Botha, Gurion's Cage miscreants eventually form a beginner's militia, aimed at overthrowing the school administration and establishing a new Jewish holiday celebrating something Gurion calls "perfect justice." When the genuinely religious Eliyahu enters their incorrigible ranks as a transfer student from Brooklyn - unlike Gurion, Eliyahu's a frummer, who wears a fedora and tzitzit - the Cage's rebellion boils into an open war less "The Breakfast Club" (A.D. 1985) and more the Bar Kokhba revolt (A.D. 132-35). Gurion's your typical Midwestern prodigy, with multhingual fluency and superhuman strength, his mother a retired Israeli Defense Forces commando of Ethiopian descent, his father a civil rights attorney reviled publicly (but respected at home) for defending the First Amendment rights of local neo-Nazis. This prepubescent Jabotinsky also has something of the rabbi in him, as he's able to command in a single breath assorted items of Judaic arcana: biblical anecdotes, Talmudic responsa, Hasidic homiletics. Yet one of the most promising students ever to grace an Illinois Solomon Schechter School can't keep from fighting others: Gurion's as bellicose as most anti-Semites think Israel is, and if you'd agree with them then you'd be his enemy, too. Despite the daily self-defense demands of his stridently expressed identity, Gurion still finds time to make two classic blunders that keep the story moving. He falls in love with a Unitarian, his redheaded classmate Eliza June Watermark, then takes pep-rally hostages whose release requires the negotiation tactics of Philip Roth. (Literally so: Roth makes a Mosaic cameo and, as usual, has the best lines: "Boychik, we've got very little time here, and what I want to tell you is you should let these kids go.") As in the Talmud, there isn't much plot, just water-fountain tattle, summaries, lists and, interspersed, charts and strange doodled maps that only distract. Aptakisic Junior High, named after the chief of an extinct Indian tribe, isn't quite the Babylonian academies, and Levin's occasional insistence on the sanctity of a locker-lined hallway is laudable if a little ridiculous. Levin could have explored that approach, developing Gurion's holiness into a genuine teenage theology wherein the popular kids are divinities and the outcasts the demons; or he could have exploited the metaphor of the inmates of the Cage as modern Israelis, presenting Zionism as a symptom of their immaturity. Instead, he bombards the reader with a surfeit of incident in adolescent Babel: "During Lunch-Recess, I sat at the teacher cluster with My Main Man Scott Mookus, Benji Nakamook, Leevon Ray and Jelly Rothstein. Vincie Portite would have normally been there too, but he had a longtime secret crush on a girl in normal classes - he wouldn't tell us who - and once or twice a week he'd leave the Cage for LunchRecess in order to look at her. No one who was there with me that day had to be except for Jelly. She was on two weeks cafeteria- and recess-suspension for telling the hot-lunch ladies there was a corn on her wiener and it hurt." SUCH trivialities hurt indeed. If an idea is "mental," as in "crazy," to Gurion it's "dental." Snot and spit, which saturate these sentences, are "gooze." If one does or says a thing very "kaufman," that means it's kooky, though I'm not sure Andy would have approved. Unfortunately the illuminations of "The Instructions" aren't the three millenniums of Jewish literature in a host of tongues but rather the very recent language of the American novel: hyperactive, hyper-reactive. Just as Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem's Second Temple, was bad for the Jews, so is David Foster Wallace - Levin's tutelary goy. Nebuchadnezzar, who decimated the First Temple, was said to have the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle but the head of a man, and Wallace wrote Nebuchadnezzarian sentences: similarly motley, mutant. Levin's attempt to ape Wallace's caffeinated chatter, to mimic that ferocious power, is unseemly and disastrous - an instance, almost, of a man playing God. More than stylistically though, Levin's conceit of a child genius misapprehended in a scholastic setting has to remind us of "Infinite Jest," that account of the prodigy Hal Incandenza and his time at the Enfield Tennis Academy. But Wallace, like God, and even like the mere mortals who wrote the Talmud, opted for multiple perspectives, whereas "The Instructions" remains univocal - it's all Gurion's voice - and it ultimately devolves not into commentaries and interpretive apparatuses but into a vague ending involving a fudged miracle and an ostensible kidnapping by the Mossad. This all makes for a very long joke: a setup that lacks a punch line. Joshua Cohen's most recent novel is "Witz."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 14, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Levin's enormous first novel is narrated by a hyper, megalomaniac prodigy, a 10-year-old boy named Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee who has skipped grades and been expelled for violent behavior from three Chicago schools. He is now in the CAGE program for problem students at Aptakisic Junior High, and even more determined to incite rebellion, if not an all-out holy war. Gurion is tough, wily, ferociously fluent in Jewish theology, an avid fan of Philip Roth and Jewish humor, verbally pyrotechnic, and bizarrely charismatic. His father is a civil rights lawyer who gets trampled by enraged Jews for defending a neo-Nazi; his mother is a former Israeli soldier, a mental health professional, and black. Spurred to assemble his children's army by anti-Semitic hate crimes and the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East, Gurion does not deny that he could be a potential messiah. Levin's mammoth, riotous, Talmudic, impossibly excessive yet brilliant, mesmerizing, warmhearted, and hilarious work of chutzpah takes place over four feverish days but encompasses the whole of Israel's battle for existence and the Jewish quest for home and peace.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Only four days pass between the opening scene of boys waterboarding one another to the moment when 10-year-old Gurion Maccabee and his army attempt to take down their unfair school system, but in the dense, frenzied pages of Levin's outsized debut, those few days feel like forever. Gurion, who narrates and refers to the text as "a work of scripture," sees himself as the hero of a yet-to-be-recognized Jewish holiday that celebrates the birth of "perfect justice," and recruits an army of misfits and Torah scholars. But nothing happens quickly, and Levin is as content to tend to the screwy plot as he is to allow Gurion to go on extended digressions about Philip Roth and any number of other topics. Between the hubris it takes to expect readers to digest more than 1,000 pages about a tween who says "the likelihood that I was [the messiah] seemed to me to be increasing by the second" and the shoving in of e-mails, diagrams, and transcripts of television footage, the idea that this could be a great novel is overshadowed by the fact that this is a great big novel, shaggy and undisciplined, but with moments of brilliance. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
