Book review: The Instructions

by Adam Levin

Canongate, 1030pp, £20

Review by Tom Adair

This book is big – so outrageously huge when it smacked the doormat it shook the whole house like a second coming. But size isn’t everything. Sometimes it’s nothing. Even with biblical allusions.

Adam Levin’s debut novel is a foot-breaker, not a heart breaker. Half way through, it felt increasingly like a preposterous over-worked jest. An “infinite jest” – to co-opt the title of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, to which this book bears several similarities. The Instructions stars the prodigy Gurion Maccabee, who casts his mind back to four cataclysmic days at the heart of his misbehaving school career, which explodes into revolution at Aptakisic Junior High School, Illinois.

Weighing in at exactly 1,030 pages (footnotes included), the text is preceded by an epigraph from the Old Testament’s book of First Samuel, chapter 15, verse 23: “Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry.” Riffle these pages and catch the laughter. Gurion idolises himself, and he never shuts up. He remembers every- thing and insists on writing it down like a one-man Babel tower in terror of falling silent.

Already expelled from a bunch of Chicago area schools for assaults on staff and fellow students, he winds up in Aptakisic’s “CAGE program”, an experiment in containing and reforming student miscreants by lumping them together. Their monitor, a “bent Australian claw-fist” named Mr Botha, stirs their resentment, their visceral hatred of the system, and Gurion’s burgeoning paranoia.

For Gurion is obsessed with his own centrality and with his god. “Show us, Adonai, when to set aside our books for weapons, for sometimes scholars must become soldiers.” He sets out four pages of step-by-step details, instructing “Israelite boys” to make guns. “Never again will we cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children.” He lays his plans. He is the messiah. His day has come.

But he hedges his bets. He will not confirm his messiah status. Instead he commits the Talmudic sin of falling in love with Eliza June Watermark, a gentile, and fellow student who, with his coterie of disciples, marches inexorably towards the book’s consuming climax.

Gurion’s parents from time to time are allowed a voice – indulging their son in his anti-establishment delusions. The mother, an ex-Israeli Defence Force commando, appears more complex than the father, a defence attorney awaiting the imminent verdict on one of his clients, a neo-Nazi.

The parents seem sane, whereas Gurion’s mounting megalomania blazes forth from the cocksure narration. Not only obsessed (with god and with June and with his mission of retribution), he is unfortunately gifted with the ability to express it at length and ad nauseam, and with a fly-on-the-wall attentiveness to minutae that quickly wears thin. First, he vandalises the school to impress his girlfriend, and, later when news arrives that the pop sensation, Boystar, is to shoot a music video in the school, this is taken as a signal for student revolt. The “Gurionic War” breaks out in earnest.

Boystar’s teeth are smashed, a death occurs, mayhem ensues, hostages are taken and the inevitable stand-off with the authorities, (reported by national media), reaches farcical proportions , to the point where Philip Roth, (Gurion’s idol and favourite author and “the greatest living Jew” ), is interrupted in his hideaway “in the sticks” to intervene: “Boychic … this stunt you’re pulling’s sealed fame for you forever, or at least a few years, and now it’s time to give up peacefully.”

The gods of literature should have whispered the same to Levin. But neither he nor Gurion Maccabee is listening. He has started and must finish, with a planned miracle.

“The 11/17 Miracle” turns out to be an escape ruse. Its prototype you’ll find fully formed in the Book of Exodus, and carried out with greater panache. A Hollywood blockbuster is unlikely to result from The Instructions’ final thrust for ultimate glory. The child genius moves on to further self-absorption. His voice is exclusive, never inclusive. As a reader you’re kept at bay. Levin’s attempts to change the register by punctuating the text with e-mails, progress reports and telephone calls, is a gesture thrown away.

Gurion flows, an unstoppable bedlam. He’s sometimes witty beyond his years. But not as witty as Roth, DeLillo or Foster Wallace to whom he aspires.

l Adam Levin is at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 27 August