A review by brandon_melcher
The Instructions by Adam Levin

challenging emotional funny reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

On October 7th of 2023, Hamas committed heinous violence against Israeli civilians attending a music festival. The following four months have seen the most blatantly genocidal backlash since the original Nakba. Through the end of that same month, I was reading The Instructions.
 

The Instructions was published in 2010, but it remains a relevant exploration of political violence and the complex matrices within which such destructive acts occur. 

After seeking it out for years, I had finally procured The Instructions. This is a thick debut novel from Adam Levin, but that works for me. If I see a thick book in a store, I am going to be psychically compelled to pick it up and at least read the synopsis. This book I sought after reading about its plot: four days and 1000 pages from the view of an adolescent and belligerent pre-teen. 

As many reviews have said before me, Gurion falls in love with a Gentile on a Tuesday, and he manages to lead an insurrection against The Arrangement of his school before the following weekend. Between these events, Levin fills the word count with listserv email chains, psych evals, and detention assignments, each providing Gurion with some angle to proselytize his Damage Proper. In this book, the plot is subdominant to the characters and thematic elements. 

Levin crafts beautifully complex characters. Gurion could be the Messiah, and he is very much an asshole adolescent. Viewing him as purely one or the other doesn’t fit with the events in the novel. He cries with friends and lovers when they have been wronged, but he also perceives violence as the right answer almost all of the time. As our narrator, I had to view all his choices as motivated by his theosophy, but in a first read it wasn’t clear where he misled me. 

Many of the other characters in the book are similarly grey in ethics. You have loving and coddling parents, sympathetic and mentally disturbed school children, and learned and arrogant rabbis. This choice by Levin just accentuates the complexity of deciding who is righteous. I found myself alternating between rooting for the members of the Damage Proper and wilting under the gravity of their poor choices. 

All of that character work went into supporting the central metaphor of the book (as I read it; I want to emphasize that: THESE ARE MY VIEWS). Aptakisic High School has an extreme in-school punishment for chronic misbehavior: The Cage. Within, one teacher reigns supreme and all the students must do their school work isolated at their cubicles, interpersonal communication forbidden. The students must present passes to enter and leave while their interactions with the rest of the student body are strictly controlled to the point of non-existence. Does this sound familiar yet? 

The so-contained students are there for more-or-less valid reasons: Gurion has been expelled twice for violence; Nakamook has hurt many kids and may have committed some light arson; Gurion’s “main-man”, a severely mentally handicapped singer-savant that cannot stop talking, appears to be placed in here for his disabilities. The supervisor’s decision to enact the same treatment towards malicious behavior that he does when dealing with the more metnally challenged creates an escalating tension among the Cage inmates. 

Eventually, Gurion’s preaching reaches enough ears, and is pliable enough in those mind-spaces, that The Cage explodes in violence. As with Gaza, I commiserated with their mistreatment. He ignores one student long enough to piss themselves, among other more ridiculous slights. At the same time, when the extremism expresses itself in bruises, broken jaws, and longer-lasting injuries, I couldn’t help but disdain Gurion for forcing all these victims to become the terrorists. 

I don’t want to give too much away here, but the crater Gurion made of his friends’ lives left me irate and melancholy. His leadership was wasted on such an impotent act. 

This political conflict kept me rapt the entire book. I kept wondering to where his diatribes against the Arrangement would lead, but at the end of the day, his glorification of Damage prevented his ability to see beyond bloodletting. 

This preponderance of philosophical and political exploration places this book square into my wheelhouse of enjoyment. When you add in the meandering plot and morally gray characters, you don’t have to read the prophecies of Isaiah to divine that I will be collecting more Adam Levin novels.