‘Mount Chicago’
By Adam Levin
Doubleday (592 pages)

In Adam Levin’s latest novel, “Mount Chicago,” on November 17, 2021, a sinkhole swallows up a portion of the Windy City’s downtown and several thousand of its denizens. In the sequelae of this “terrestrial anomaly,” events conspire to bring together writer-cum-comedian Solomon Gladman, whose wife perishes in the disaster, and Apter Schutz, the wunderkind spin doctor for Chicago’s mayor and one of Gladman’s most ardent fans.

Mr. Levin’s third novel is the slimmest that he has published to date. Running to 573 pages of absurdist antics, it is nevertheless the latest representative of the now-familiar massive postmodern novel and serves as an effort to answer that genre’s critics — a retort from the “Infinite Jest” generation against the contrary winds of changing fashions. Is it any good, though? Well, your mileage may vary.

Generation X, the once-young brood whose collective voice was lifted from Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, is firmly ensconced in middle age. Dave Eggers, the founder of McSweeney’s — the publishing concern that put out Mr. Levin’s first novel, The Instructions — and the standard-bearer for a particular set of smart ironists, is 52. Mr. Levin is himself in his mid-forties. A crisis of inspiration for aging enfants terribles, or a defense of a generational ethos, is perhaps inevitable.

“Mount Chicago” has all the expected features of the postmodern sprawler — the typographic hijinks (charts, photographs, lists), the variegated colloquialisms (“total Jew,” “choky,” “more Dallas Winston-ish than Columbo-ish”), the descriptions of substance abuse and sexual congress that are probably meant to be shocking, the background of absurd disaster. In short, it’s more of the same — a hit parade of the American postmodern novel’s techniques from 1985’s “White Noise” on. 

Mr. Levin appears to be aware of this, and mounts a basically conservative defense of what was once an avant-garde genre. He uses an introduction to set out a programmatic statement: “That I want the lies I write down to feel truer and realer than facts even as I admit they are lies via calling them fiction is, I believe, the only biographical information about me that a reader of my fiction should need to possess to be thrilled by my fiction.”

Mr. Levin thus sets himself against literary fiction’s swing toward “autofiction” — the airbrushed and exaggerated memoirs that are the written equivalent of hyperrealist painting, or, perhaps less charitably, reality television. “Autofiction” happens to be the dominant mode among the hottest set of writers ten to twenty years younger than Mr. Levin, including the fabulously funny Patricia Lockwood, the less funny Lauren Oyler, and the not-funny-at-all Edouard Louis. 

Mr. Levin rejects the idea that “a fiction writer can be granted authority (or that a fiction writer must be granted authority) over the subject matter with which his work contends by something or someone other than the work itself” — “I’m not interested in that stuff. I don’t find it interesting.” In a mischievous, autofiction-mocking twist, he adds, “And so why include this introduction, then? Because, first of all, I lack the courage of my convictions.” 

Cultural or political misgivings accompany this skepticism of people who are “asking for credentials” and “attestations to lived experience.” While introducing the character of Schutz, Mr. Levin complains, “These days, more than ever before, people needed to believe you were oppressed before they were willing to give you more power than whatever power you already had, even if you deserved that extra power anyway, and so anyone with any political sense knew how to play oppressed while standing on a throat.”

Admirable humanistic sentiments all, and, in the current environment, even brave in their way — see, for example, Jonathan Russell Clark’s too-long essay in Esquire retorting Mr. Levin’s implicit rejection of “wokeness” — yet we are left with the question: Is “Mount Chicago” any good? Does the lie Mr. Levin tells feel truer than fact? For this reviewer, it falls short. 

Wallace and Mr. DeLillo, at their best, use their techniques to make us reinhabit some part of the self that has become alienated or hidden. They record our voices and play them back to us, and we hear how strange our verbal tics sound. By contrast, Mr. Levin mostly conveys to us how much he likes those tools — when Gladman hears someone use the verb “DON’T!ed,” he appreciates the “the small thrill in imagining the way he’d spell it.” Mr. Levin uses the technique to point to itself rather than to our lives.

The promise of the massive postmodern novel is to realize at the scale of the world the central conceit of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” — “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem.” It is a return of the heroic and mendacious fiction of “Tom Jones” and “Moby-Dick” after the ever narrower, ever more rarefied American realism of the twentieth century. Mr. Levin’s literary allegiances are sympathetic; this reviewer shares them. But can’t we do better than mere technique? And if we can’t, isn’t it time for something new?