A review by dllh
The Instructions by Adam Levin

4.0

This is a good book, and long. It's certainly not conventional. I added it to my to-read list when it was new nearly a decade ago, and it came up on the wallace-l email list recently, with someone citing Levin in this book as someone working in a similar vein as Wallace. Well, he's no Wallace, but this is a heckuva book. It's hard to describe it, really. I didn't love every moment of it. Sometimes it drags a little, and about halfway through, Levin ramps up the characters' meta-thinking (meaning inward spiraling thinking about thinking) in a way that's familiar to and that resonates with me but that got a little tired as it kept being repeated. The book didn't connect with me emotionally or even intellectually on the whole, but it's still a neat book. It sometimes put me in mind of Barth's Giles Goat Boy.