Andru Okun
Adam Levin. Photo: © Renaud Monfourny One thing I like about Adam Levin’s novels is that they take over your life for a time. They’re very large, but their immersive nature is mostly due to Levin’s idiosyncratic weirdness. His 2010 debut, The Instructions—a thousand-plus-page novel told from the perspective of a precocious ten-year-old Jewish boy with messianic tendencies—was followed by a short story collection in 2012, Hot Pink. Now there is Bubblegum, a nearly eight-hundred-page novel narrated by a thirty-eight-year-old man named Belt Magnet, an amateur memoirist who has long, private conversations with inanimate objects. Set in an alternate