Read This: The Instructions

I’ve got another review at Shelf Awareness this morning, in which I express great enthusiasm for Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions. it’s well over a thousand pages long, but it’s totally worth it. Imagine if the perpetrators of the massacre at Columbine had been religious zealots who’d studied counterinsurgency tactics, and you’ve come a little bit towards understanding Gideon Maccabee, a 10-year-old boy genius stuck in “The Cage,” the room where his junior high school sticks all its troubled or dangerous students, and the four days in which he gathers his classmates together as “The Side of Damage” and wreaks utter and total havoc. As I told Shelf Awareness readers, Gideon’s voice is a bit like a 21st-century A Clockwork Orange, but with some strong influence from George Saunders—I’m thinking here especially of the way in which Saunders invests absurd situations with emotional authenticity. (Somebody’s going to mention Chuck Palahniuk, too, and Levin’s totally anticipated that.) It’s a profoundly disturbing novel, all the more so perhaps for being one of the smartest novels I’ve read this year.

And The Instructions is already shaping up to be one of those novels that divides literary critics. Maud Newton was impressed, describing it as “dark, funny, and deeply provocative,” while Joshua Cohen dismissed it as “a very long joke: a setup that lacks a punch line.” There’s a twist to Cohen’s review, though, and he lays the issue out in his opening line: “Who better to review a 1,000-page Jewish book that comes out in the fall than the author of an 800-page Jewish book that came out in the spring?” (I haven’t read Witz yet, but I do have it out on my bookcase where I can see it, daring me.) Well, some people might be able to think of several better candidates; as Jason Diamond observed in Jewcy:

“What bothers me is the ethics question: Cohen obviously has a stake in all this, so was it fair to let him review Levin’s book? Wouldn’t another critic have been more appropriate to tackle The Instructions? Maybe a critic shouldn’t be able to come out and try to essentially advertise his own book in one of the most respected forums around. To put it in really simple terms: It’s almost like they let the author of Twilight review the Vampire Diaries.”

My own take? The New York Times Book Review knew exactly what it was doing when it selected Cohen to review Levin, and my suspicion is that they were hoping to generate exactly the sort of “controversy” that has indeed taken place. I’ve long believed that the NYTBR deliberately sets out to gin up literary controversies perhaps under the misguided assumption that being the only newspaper book review section that people still talk about is the same thing as being the only newspaper book review section that matters. In this specific case, I think Cohen is wrong, and wrong in a very simplistic way—by reducing the voice of The Instructions to a “unseemly and disastrous” imitation of David Foster Wallace (“Levin’s tutelary goy”), Cohen misses out on all the other elements I mentioned above. His attempt to dismiss The Instructions as “the Jewish novel you’ll never finish” will, I hope, prove to be a failure.

11 November 2010 | read this, theory |

Read This: Brute

Lt. General Victor “Brute” Krulak is credited, in Robert Coram’s Brute with a crucial role in developing the amphibious landing vehicles that helped the United States Marine Corps push their way through the Pacific theater of operations during the Second World War, and with developing a strategy for counterinsurgent tactics which, had it actually been used during the Vietnam War, might have led to a different outcome. Coram also honors Krulak for his work in making sure that the other branches of the American military, jealous of the Marines’ success and their prestige, did not succeed in decimating the Corps in the 1940s and 1950s. (Even Truman and Eisenhower resented the Marines and tried to massively reduce their fighting power.) And, after the scandalous death of several recruits during a late-night march through a swamp led by a drunken drill instructor, Krulak overhauled the basic training program, essentially creating the boot camp experience that both my parents (you read that right) went through when they enlisted in the 1960s. So there’s definitely some level of personal interest in Krulak’s story on my part.

That said, Brute is the sort of book I’d recommend more for the story it tells than for the quality of the telling. Coram does a respectably solid job of explaining Krulak’s profound significance to the modern Marine Corps, not just in combat operations from Okinawa to Vietnam but in the bureaucratic battles between the wars, but he tends to push his inferences about Krulak’s character, such as a deliberate suppression of his Jewish background, a bit harder than I’m comfortable with (although, honestly, that’s just about where Coram and I would draw the line between speculating as to Krulak’s motives and flat-out insisting upon them). And while I consider myself pretty gung-ho where the Corps is concerned, even I think Coram lays the mystique on a little thick, setting out lines like “another piece of barren soil soaked by Marine blood, fertilized by Marine grief, and consecrated by Marine valor” (his description of Khe Sanh) with some frequency. Still, there is plenty of interesting material here, including some preliminary gestures towards a revisionist approach towards Vietnam-era history (which could actually be a fertile field for research by younger scholars whose attitudes weren’t formed in the crucible of the boomers’ cultural conflict). On the whole, I’d have to agree with Dwight Garner, who’s also reviewing Brute today: Coram’s account of Krulak’s life and legacy is “at times ragged and hectoring, but always plainspoken and absorbing.”

10 November 2010 | read this |