lifecycleofamentalobject replied to your photo “get hype”

Is it bad bad. Or just bad coming from Adam. Would you consider it worse than “Super Sad Love Story” for example?

That’s an extremely good question!

I’d also thought of Super Sad True Love Story as a comparison point.  Their quality differs in a specific, simple way: Bubblegum is a worse book by a better author.

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Super Sad True Love Story isn’t a great book, but it keeps you entertained.  It doesn’t jerk the reader around much, it keeps the quality level pretty even and maintains its tone throughout (it’s a hybrid tone that can feel chaotic at short range, but is homogeneous when you zoom out to any significant number of pages).  It’s written in the kind of “good prose” that doesn’t have significant artistic effects on its own, but merely tags along for the ride, amusing you with its irrelevant acrobatics during otherwise dull moments.

And its social satire is targetless and toothless in a fairly transparent way – it’s ostensibly “dystopian” but it never tries to make the reader hate anyone or feel anyone’s pain.  It’s a dystopia that doesn’t try to make you care about the bad things in it, i.e. one whose writer doesn’t care about those things either.  It’s not good, but it’s harmless.

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Bubblegum is, for one thing, much longer.  It aims a lot higher, and it tells you about its high aims both explicitly – by being very clearly about some particular Big Things, which it fixates on at great length – and implicitly, by strategically deploying flashes of energy and potential near the beginning, by drawing you into its unusual world in an artfully paced manner … and by demanding you read a large amount of material that is clearly unpleasant on purpose, or which is not strictly unpleasant in itself but drags out the pacing in exactly the “wrong” places with a clearly-on-purpose excruciating effect.

It builds up credit with the reader through a Ponzi scheme: “no one,” you (the mark) thinks, “would straight-up demand this kind of dedication from me without a hell of a lot to back it up.”  It is often fun to read in the way Levin’s other writing is, it’s in that style, it has that sense of humor and that way with words, but they’re applied to subjects that are not fun to read about, indeed to subjects that seem optimized for being not fun to read about.

I’m having trouble describing this without spoilers, because the book is so min-maxed to achieve this specific effect!  I’d like to say something like “much of this book is about A doing B about X’s very Y Z while their P, who’s Q, does R” where that phrase (if its variables were filled in) would sound joke-level terrible, like a made-up thought-experiment example of a thing no one would want to read.  But revealing A/B/X/Y/Z/P/Q/R together would reveal a large fraction of the book’s plot: virtually every major element, everything that takes significant setup, is at some point roped into the quest for Minimum Fun and perversely “deployed” to make the answer to “so what is Bubblegum about?” somehow even worse, even more like a made-up thought-experiment example of etc. etc.

And yes, it’s still Adam Levin, so it’s still funny, and full of those wonderful and winsome logical-case-parsing monologues that absolutely no one else writes, and so forth.  But … it’s still, pointedly, about [the filled-in version of “A doing B about X’s very Y Z while their P, who’s Q, does R,” and the like].

This is clearly on purpose.  To even begin to like the book, I assume, you’d have to grapple with the idea that this is being done on purpose, and defend it as an outré but ultimately successful choice.

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Or maybe not?  If I’d never read anything else by the guy, I suppose maybe I’d spend the book newly impressed (in a way difficult to counterfactually simulate in my head) with all his gifts (which I, non-counterfactually, have seen in identical form elsewhere).

I might even enjoy it as a kind of bizarro, bad-drug-laced version of Super Sad True Love Story as described above: an incoherent and pointless pseudo-satire that strings you along with numerous micro-level entertainments and displays of writerly acrobatics, and for that alone is “a good read” the whole way through.  An above-average way to spend a number of hours sitting in a chair, which you won’t think about much over the rest of your life, but which was probably superior to however else you might have spent those chair-hours.

So your interesting question has an interesting answer.  It’s not “bad bad,” compared to most contemporary fiction.  But it is bad coming from Adam, and in fact so much so that it wraps around to being “bad bad” when considered in light of his earlier work.  Not just that it’s disappointing, or a waste of potential. Those imply accident, incompetence, whereas this is willful and malicious: the potential isn’t being wasted, it’s being visibly and teasingly misused to do bad things that become even worse when done so “well.”

“The very worst Adam Levin novel still theoretically compatible with the laws of physics” turns out to be actually pretty good, by the standards of a lot of people’s novels, but it’s still kind of a fucked-up thing to create on purpose, if you see what I mean.