Mount Chicago

March 1, 2022

A major disaster strikes Chicago, with the earth falling away beneath everyone's feet, and a Jewish comedian, his most committed fan, and the city's mayor are among the main characters struggling to survive. Meanwhile, NYPL Young Fiction Lions Levin gets to comment on issues like Chicago politics, stand-up comedy, Jewish identity, loss, and resilience.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 6, 2022
In Levin’s exhausting metafictional latest, a sinkhole opens under Chicago and swallows up big swaths of the city. Comedian and novelist Solly Gladman stays home with hemorrhoids while his family takes a trip to the museum, then disappear in the sinkhole, leaving Gladman to drown in whiskey, Xanax, and regret. Gladman’s “foil,” Apter Schutz, who made big profits off a hilarious scheme involving desk calendars meant to parody white nationalists, idolizes Gladman. After Apter is recruited to work for the mayor, who wants to create “Mount Chicago,” a memorial that will be a “less depressing Auschwitz,” the mayor tasks Apter with putting together “Day Zero,” a music festival to aid the city’s recovery. Apter finally gets the chance of an encounter with Gladman when he is tasked with finding and convincing him to perform. Unfortunately, Levin undercuts the otherwise satisfying sociopolitical comedy with frustrating interjections about his struggles to write this novel and sell his previous one, his wife’s uncertainty about whether Apter or Gladman is supposed to be Levin, and many other asides that read like missives to creative writing students or nod to the difficulties of this latest project. As the frustrated reader will find, acknowledging a problem is not equivalent to solving it.

July 1, 2022
Levin's (Bubblegum, 2020) latest massive, meandering, meta Chicago-set novel begins with a narrator named Adam Levin describing his teen acid trips and uttering what becomes the novel's wry refrain, "Perhaps I've gotten off track." Enter Gladman, an endlessly anxious writer and stand-up comedian with a cult following, who satirizes Jewish stereotypes. He declines to accompany his wife and entire family on a brunch-and-museum outing downtown the day a gargantuan sinkhole devours Chicago Loop landmarks and thousands of people. Gladman is left catastrophically alone with his high-strung parrot, Gogol. Their obsessive ruminations roil in contrast with a brainy and audacious Gladman fan, Apter, who sails through a series of vaudevillian metamorphoses involving behavioral psychology, advertising, and politics. Levin's extravagant off-the-trackness also encompasses the mayor's vision for turning the gigantic cone of wreckage into a memorial called Mount Chicago and an immersion in an avian-ruled Kingdom of Chicago involving a duck-centered variation on the tale of Moses. If only this novel's too-muchness didn't threaten to capsize Levin's bravura dramatization of grief and the paradoxes of storytelling, his incandescent passages of philosophical inquiry, arresting insight, pathos, and hilarity.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 15, 2022
After a huge swath of downtown Chicago is swallowed up by a freakish sinkhole, an acclaimed Jewish novelist who had a brief run as a stand-up comic and an obsessive fan who becomes a mayoral aide confront their losses. The novelist, Solomon Gladman, lost his entire family to the "terrestrial anomaly" (as city officials insist it be called), leaving him to obsess over the intensely neurotic behavior of his parrot, Gogol. Having become a clinical social worker, he is attuned to that task. The fan is Apter Schutz, who by the age of 21 made millions marketing a subversive desk calendar aimed at "real Americans," followed his hero into psychotherapy, and then went to work for a hapless mayor determined to build Mount Chicago, a memorial to the disaster victims that is "as moving as Auschwitz" but "less depressing." At the core of the novel--which, at almost 600 pages, is a walk in the park compared to Levin's 1,000-page opus, The Instructions (2010)--is an epic discussion of the meaning of survival that culminates in the soft, made-for-2022 notion that anyone who is even aware of a death "survives" it. Seemingly by design, the novel tests the reader's patience with long streams of obsessive musings on subjects ranging from pizza preferences to the films of Steven Spielberg (whom David Mamet, one of the real-life figures in the book, calls a "pretentious schlockmeister"). In his opening disclaimer, Levin says that " 'ideas' get in the way of art," but his art is all about how affirming it can be, during these times of Covid-narrowed lives, to dose on ideas. "I digress, therefore I'm alive" might be his theme--a deeply affecting one when all is said and redone. A sometimes wearying but boldly rewarding work of metafiction.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.