Bubblegum

December 2, 2019
Levin (The Instructions) takes readers to an alternate reality where people are obsessed with robotic pets called Botimals, or “cures.” The funny and occasionally moving narrative, which is set in 1988 and 2013, partially takes the form of a memoir of Belt Magnet. As a young man, Belt, a diagnosed psychotic who hears inanimate objects, enters an experimental study to receive a cure, named Blank, which is about the size of a chipmunk and can rest inside Belt’s sleeve. Blank is extraordinarily cute and able to perform tricks and dances no other cures can match. Belt’s diffuse, episodic memoir details his struggles growing up, including a period when he destroys swing sets, and dealing with a rich bully named Jonboat. The story builds to Belt’s unlikely friendship with Jonboat’s son, Triple J, who is an aspiring writer and filmmaker. Other threads include Belt’s complex relationship with his father, especially during his mother’s illness, and the backstory of Triple-J’s stepmother, a transgender performance artist and scholar. The narrative starts to feel bloated as Levin goes deep into the history of the cures, adding such metafictional pieces as brochures, research papers, and film transcripts. Despite the novel’s slow parts, Levin creates a fascinating world with a wild and often touching coming-of-age story at its center. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency.

February 1, 2020
The past isn't even past--but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most. Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn't so shaggy. In fact, it's a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or "cure," a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin's future--or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s--the technological advances we've become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You'd think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin's hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, "short for Kablankey, the name I'd given it, at my mother's suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze." By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does--and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, "Let's use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops--some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn't end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy." If Levin's point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again. A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media--and without social graces, for that matter.

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Starred review from February 15, 2020
Levin follows his mammoth debut, The Instructions (2010), with another monumentally imaginative novel. In an alternate history in which the internet has never existed, a cute economy has developed around Curios?adorable, hamster-sized animal-like robots?which emerged in the 1980s. The narrator is the fabulously named Belt Magnet, whose memoir the book ostensibly is. He lives a quiet life in Illinois with his cantankerous father, and he has a psychotic disorder that leads him to believe he can converse with inanimate objects. Belt flips between 1988 and 2013 in order to explain the increasingly unsettling things that are being done to Curios. Along the way, he weaves in his tragic family story, his complex relationship with his classmate Jonboat?a supremely rich local wunderkind?as well as film criticism and even a section consisting of instruction manuals. While the influence of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest looms large?there are long descriptions of movies, Jonboat's intoxicatingly beautiful wife, a vividly imagined alternate history, and a focus on the costs of entertainment and pleasure?Levin's vibrant voice is unlike anyone else in contemporary fiction. While breathtakingly bizarre, this relentlessly inventive novel teems with humanity, humor, and pathos like few other recent works and is a book many will obsess over and delight in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2019

In an alternate future with no internet but instead interactive technology called Curio, 38-year-old Belt Magnet is living with his widowed father and utterly absorbed by Curio and his books when a simple trip to the bank explodes his world. From NYPL Young Lion Levin (The Instructions); the cover will reputedly smell like bubblegum.

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