a dirty joke (on bubblegum)

bubblegum spoiler-ful notes (tagging @xngurevar who expressed interest)

this is very long and i’m fairly proud of a lot of it.  if you have any interest in reading this book, this will spoil “the experience” for you.

i don’t recommend having any interest in reading this book, and especially not in having “the experience.”

Keep reading

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.

fipindustries:

nostalgebraist:

nostalgebraist:

get hype

the book was bad :(

welp, still hyped for what i imagine is going to be some scathing criticism

@fipindustries​ [re: Bubblegum]

welp, still hyped for what i imagine is going to be some scathing criticism

Yeah… I definitely want to write something about it.  I mean, the author wrote my favorite novel – or it’d be tied for top 2 or 3, anyway – so my disappointment is surprising, and seems like it ought to be meaningful or interesting.

Plus, given my previous level of respect for the guy, I feel like I have almost an obligation to think about his book seriously, and treat its failure (if it is failure) as a startling misfire by a talented artist – an epic folly, a brilliant execution of a fundamentally bad idea, something like that – rather than just dismissing it with all the other bad books that get published every year.

The trouble is that it … is really not even very interestingly bad.  It’s just bad.  Or anyway, I’m having trouble finding an interesting gloss on it.  I can’t think of any higher-level interpretations that don’t absolutely suck, in such a basic way that they aren’t even worth talking about for long.

The least bad way I can look at the book is as a collection of a bunch of little pieces, many of which are individually “pretty good” or even “great,” where you’re not supposed to care too much what it adds up to.

The closest thing to an interesting theme I can extract from my reactions, right now, is that Bubblegum feels like a far more immature book than The Instructions.  It’s super weird – whereas Instructions was a first novel that felt masterful and perfectly self-assured, Levin “at home in his writerly skin” from day one, Bubblegum isn’t a first novel but is (maybe on purpose?? god dammit) almost a parody of what bad first novels are like.  For instance

1. it’s about a writer, and he spends a lot of time talking about writer’s block, and navel-gazingly wondering about whether people have read his (obscure) work and whether they liked it if so, and when he’s not doing that he’s talking about his troubles with women, you know, the ones all these semi-autobiographical first-novel guys have

2. the writer character is a pathetic schlub in general, and this feels almost like an extended running joke at the guy’s expense, where he’s self-aware enough to be really self-conscious and make all these pre-emptive jokes about his own patheticness, but not enough to actually change it or double down and really own it

…which is the kind of character you’d write if you were worried you were this guy, and wanted to head off the accusation by doing the same pre-emptive self-criticism on a meta level – implying you + the reader are “better than” this guy (we can see him from outside, see his defense mechanisms) but still writing the exact book that guy would write

3. On that note, the whole book feels very defensive?  It has all these themes about Art and Artists that make it hard to criticize it without feeling like you’re falling into a trap, e.g. one major character is really interested in “creating new experiences” in the abstract for artistic reasons, and his elevation of this above other values is critiqued harshly – so then if I say “this book is hackneyed” I now have to explain why I’m not being just like that guy, valuing only novelty

4. It is, as the above points suggest, “bad on purpose” a whole lot.  In a lot of different ways, clever ways.  It’s so clever about the numerous levels on which it is bad on purpose, and their relation to the object-level themes, that it feels like it’s trying to trick you into accepting this as a substitute for actually being good.  Which feels insecure, of the writer.  This gets much worse near the end and was partly responsible for my great frustration right upon finishing – the end is the worst part

5. It is really dark, in a depressive kind of way – like Lanark it has that lordly, sneering, all-encompassing, “everything turns out bad and I know the secret reasons why” attitude that the depressive mind-voice has.  This is subtle and suppressed for much of the book but creeps up on you, and explodes into the foreground near the end, revealing in retrospect its subtler traces throughout the rest.

This kind of thing feels instinctually “deep” to my brain, but simply by parasitizing off of how the depressive mind-voice itself feels instinctually “deep.”  It doesn’t actually provide a novel or useful gloss on the world, or even on the main character’s brain.  But it does provide one that feels deep, feels impregnable, perfect, “masterful.”  (Just what a new writer wants the reader to feel, is worried they won’t feel)

I’ll probably write something with spoilers later, maybe?  Maybe not?  Depends on if anyone has read the book and would read it, and I’m advising people not to read the book, so I dunno.

nostalgebraist:

get hype

the book was bad :(

get hype

Those of you who have read The Instructions (my favorite novel) may be interested to know that – at long last, after I’d kind of assumed he’d disappeared in some way, decided do something else with his life – Adam Levin has a new novel coming out next April.  See here

Here’s the blurb:

The astonishing new novel by the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of The Instructions.

Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the Internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology–a “flesh-and-bone robot” called the Curio–has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.
    At age thirty-eight, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn’t entirely sure are in his head. After Belt’s father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears, as well as his estranged childhood friend Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
    In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.

Of the various author puff-quotes on the linked page, this one seems particularly and encouragingly on-brand:

“A book may be said to be a kind of fist, and the readers of such a fist-book as Bubblegum can surely not predict or prepare for the ecstatic bewilderment of the encounter, particularly when they are greeted in the depths of it by long-form theoretical analysis of their plight.”

Jesse Ball, author of Census

responsible-reanimation:

@nostalgebraist, I’m reading The Instructions and it’s so compellingly textured and tactile and rambling in all the ways I can’t get enough of!

I’m also about 60% sure that it was written by @sinesalvatorem under a pen-name, since it reads a lot like one of her dreams/original stories: a cracklingly smartass tale of an impulsive, charismatic Jewish kid building an army and possibly being the Messiah.

I am so glad I am getting more people to read this book

Partially so I can watch each individual person have the “whoa, so, this is really good” reaction

It’s a well-kept secret, that book

A tidbit for people who have finished The Instructions (major spoilers under the cut, also in rot13 because I would feel uniquely awful if I were to spoil this book for anyone)

@xngurevar​, @hexbienium​

Keep reading

hexbienium:

hexbienium:

I’ve arrived at that point in The Instructions where I’m anxious about reading on because things have begun to come crashing down in earnest. The fact that it’s been ~820 pages in coming means that a lot of dominoes have been set up, a lot of guns have been mounted on walls—not to mention the numerous references to the awe-inspiring nature of the events that have just started to play out. I have almost no idea what the world of the novel is going to look like after the next 180 pages, what I do know of it tells me that it has to be utterly different from what I’ve gotten used to so far, and it’s abundantly clear that getting from one to the other is going to involve things and people being screwed up beyond recognition. Which is exciting and frightening in about equal measure.

In conclusion, *aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh*

(Edit: the proximate cause of why I’m afraid to read further is [rot13 for spoilers] gur Fvqr bs Qnzntr'f nggnpx ba Obgun, juvpu vf ernyyl ivpvbhf rira ol gur uvtu fgnaqneqf bs guvf obbx; V'z nccerurafvir nobhg ubj sne gurl'er tbvat gb gnxr vg, naq ernqvat gur tencuvp qrfpevcgvbaf bs jung gurl'er qbvat vf fbzrjung—gubhtu abg cebuvovgviryl—qvssvphyg sbe zr.)

Well, I finished it a couple of hours ago. As one of the reviews on the back cover says:

This is a life-consuming novel, one that demands to be read feverishly. When it is over, other fiction feels insufficient, the newspaper seems irrelevant.

I’d like to say some things of my own about the book in a future post. But it seems worth noting that my anxiety about reading the last 180 pages has been, well, completely justified.

:)

There are people out there who were disappointed by the ending, which seems inevitable, given the extreme quantity of build-up.  (I almost want to say “unprecedented quantity” – I’ve never seen a similarly long and messy story which has the same “the reader is anticipating the big climax the whole way through” structure.)  For me, well, it was one of the best reading experiences of my life.

(via hexbienium-deactivated20160126)