Sunday, November 07, 2010

Jabotinsky in a Book Review

From Joshua Cohen’s review of THE INSTRUCTIONS, a novel of 1030 pages by Adam Levin


“The Instructions” purports to be a document called “The Instructions,” word-processed by one Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, then “translated and retranslated from the Hebrew and the English by Eliyahu of Brooklyn and Emmanuel Liebman,”...This fat tablet is partly a theologico-political tract, and mostly a chronicle of four days in the life of a junior high schooler in suburban Illinois.

Gurion, master of the portentous name, is a misbehaved 10-year-old, expelled from various Chicago-­area yeshivas and now condemned to an experimental disciplinary program at Aptakisic Junior High referred to as the Cage. Oppressed by a one-handed Australian detention monitor named Victor Botha, Gurion’s Cage miscreants eventually form a beginner’s militia, aimed at overthrowing the school administration and establishing a new Jewish holiday celebrating something Gurion calls “perfect justice.” When the genuinely religious Eliyahu enters their incorrigible ranks as a transfer student from Brooklyn — unlike Gurion, Eliyahu’s a frummer, who wears a fedora and tzitzit — the Cage’s rebellion boils into an open war less “The Breakfast Club” (A.D. 1985) and more the Bar Kokhba revolt (A.D. 132-35).

Gurion’s your typical Midwestern prodigy, with multilingual fluency and super­human strength, his mother a retired Israeli Defense Forces commando of Ethiopian descent, his father a civil rights attorney reviled publicly (but respected at home) for defending the First Amendment rights of local neo-Nazis. This prepubescent Jabotinsky also has something of the rabbi in him, as he’s able to command in a single breath assorted items of Judaic arcana: biblical anecdotes, Talmudic responsa, Hasidic homiletics. Yet one of the most promising students ever to grace an Illinois Solomon Schechter School can’t keep from fighting others: Gurion’s as bellicose as most anti-Semites think Israel is, and if you’d agree with them then you’d be his enemy, too. Despite the daily self-­defense demands of his stridently expressed identity, Gurion still finds time to make two classic blunders that keep the story moving. He falls in love with a Unitarian, his redheaded classmate Eliza June Watermark, then takes pep-rally hostages whose release requires the negotiation tactics of Philip Roth. (Literally so: Roth makes a Mosaic cameo and, as usual, has the best lines: “Boychik, we’ve got very little time here, and what I want to tell you is you should let these kids go.”)

As in the Talmud, there isn’t much plot, just water-fountain tattle, summaries, lists and, interspersed, charts and strange doodled maps that only distract...

...Unfortunately the illuminations of “The Instructions” aren’t the three millenniums of Jewish literature in a host of tongues but rather the very recent language of the American novel: hyperactive, hyper-reactive. Just as Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem’s Second Temple, was bad for the Jews, so is David Foster Wallace — Levin’s tutelary goy. Nebuchadnezzar, who decimated the First Temple, was said to have the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle but the head of a man, and Wallace wrote Nebuchadnezzarian sentences: similarly motley, mutant. Levin’s attempt to ape Wallace’s caffeinated chatter, to mimic that ferocious power, is unseemly and disastrous — an instance, almost, of a man playing God...


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