Review of Bubblegum by Adam Levin

Reminded me of when I read David Foster Wallace for the first time.

 Passing through phases of amusement to annoyance to disgust, then subtly sliding into intrigue, fascination and finally settling on the far side of appreciation, but only through much readerly turmoil, many near-death-by-boredom experiences. If you like Adam Levin you will probably like Joshua Cohen.
But Levin in this book is preposterous. The main character is difficult, to say the least. As other reviews amply point out, he is not a person anyone in their right mind would want to spend any amount of time with in real life, yet here we are, spending 800 pages with Belt Magnet. We learn a lot about him. How he ended up with that cringey name – though we have to wait hundreds of pages for that answer, how he talks to inanimate objects, or rather they talk to him, and he talks back, and then he occasionally grants their desires, which are usually depressive and suicidal desires, desires which he unsurprisingly identifies with. The whole murdering of swingsets thing got on my nerves. But then you get into the whole idea of sentience, how the author grants sentience to certain objects at seeming random, and lets the main character stumble around and interact with them, before we are introduced to the non-sentient or semi-sentient flesh-and-blood robot pets. Add to that plenty of drug use, some history, gender politics, lots of satire and social commentary, all from the perspective of an incredibly paranoid obsessive compulsive individual. The sprawling paragraphs, the endless psychological double-binds and self-analysis, and worrying, and prattling dotage. Actually the best parts are typically dialogue. Dozens of absurd, slapstick side characters who talk like no one you ever met, who could and will expostulate on the subject of handkerchiefs or the novelty of fisting for hours at a time.
The only way I got through this book was by listening to the audiobook at three times speed. The readers did an excellent job. It is a cinematic book, but it hides its literary aspirations under a veneer of impossible scenarios, dreamlike surrealism, and a beating heart. Despite all of the plot contrivances, the superabundance of money in the main character’s life, which he acquires more through his inability to function as a normal human being might – except what is normal in this world is laughable or horrifying in ours. This is an alternate reality we are reading about, one with a simultaneous grounding in nostalgia for the nineties and some futuristic technology geared more toward Consumerism and wastoid existence than any sort of bright future.
Find in it shades of comedy, scenes you will feel guilty for laughing at, and perhaps Levin is laughing at all of us, or with us. Storytelling at a slant, peering into the corrupt soul of people.
One of the most interesting characters is Fonda Jane Henry, the intersex sex worker-cum-artist celebrity, who comes off as one of the most real humans on display, versus the stilted father, the quirky and belligerent bullies. Our viewpoint, Belt Magnet, is alternately a child who acts like an adult and then an adult who acts like an infant. He is the most frustrating sack of…
But if you go into it with a casual attitude and aren’t waiting to be impressed the whole time, and don’t roll your eyes at the feats of description Levin contorts with, he might just sneak up and surprise you in the end.