The Instructions, by Adam Levin

I finished reading The Instructions this morning, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write a review. I needed to write a review of this book; this book deserves a review. But even as I sit down to write this many hours later after giving it thought, I have no idea how to write a review of Adam Levin's, The Instructions. Only those that have read this book will, or even can, understand my misgivings in this task.

Like many books I've been drawn to in the last year, The Instructions is Levin's first novel, although he has published many short stories to acclaim and award. Levin is a creative writing professor in Chicago, and I imagine his students are eager to attend class each day. Both Levin's MFA in Creative writing and his MA in Clinical social work are apparent in his writing.

The Instructions begins in the pool of a suburban Chicago middle school with the intentional self-inflicted water-boarding of three students. One thousand and thirty pages later, the book ends. The pages in-between tell the events of four days in the life of Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a 10-year old boy who believes he might be the messiah and leads a small group of troubled students and hundreds of Israelite scholars in a series of escalating definances against the 'Arrangement,' meaning both the school's administration and the larger world social order.

Crazy, no? I do not deny it myself. Levin begins with situations, descriptions, and characters well-known to any American with a childhood and very slowly begins to crank up the heat until the actions, reactions, and intentions of these characters and situations are boil through to their most insane and yet logically articulated conclusions. While keeping the story almost entirely confined to the halls of a suburban middle school and the surrounding environs (minor lapses into history and world events will be excused as necessary context to settle the overarching storyline), Levin creates a complete and near perfect microcosm of the world at large and from there philosophizes concerning the nature and beginnings of religious zealism versus terroristic activity, the self-fulfilling prophecies of both, and the strength of the many compared to the strength of the one. And he raises many fascinating questions, including, but not limited to, "Can a leader who does not doubt his place in the world, lead those who do?"

To be fair, this is undoubtedly the most mangled review I have written in quite some time, if not ever ( do not hold this against the book itself). And to be honest, The Instructions is not for every reader. In many ways it is what I imagine the equivalent of reading a Quentin Tarantino movie would be (although I feel like I have used this analogy before). But it is an engrossing read that provided no end of intriguing quagmires and morbidly delightful twists among it's many pages of lessons, philosophies, and descriptions of middle school social structures. So I will say this about others' attempts to read this engaging novel: if you make it through the first chapter and still want to know more, you are hooked and will rapidly find yourself 800 pages in unable to stop speed reading pages as the final conflict builds. If you find the book banced from the first pages and see no rhythm or redeemable value in the characters then you should put the book down. There is no in-between on this one.