Bubblegum
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
"Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest, and Bubblegum is a dazzling accomplishment of wit and inventiveness." —George Saunders
"Levin's brains may have earned him a cult...but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open.” —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review
The astonishing new novel by the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of The Instructions.
Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the Internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology--a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio--has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.
At age thirty-eight, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn't entirely sure are in his head. After Belt's father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears, as well as his estranged childhood friend Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Levin (The Instructions) takes readers to an alternate reality where people are obsessed with robotic pets called Botimals, or "cures." The funny and occasionally moving narrative, which is set in 1988 and 2013, partially takes the form of a memoir of Belt Magnet. As a young man, Belt, a diagnosed psychotic who hears inanimate objects, enters an experimental study to receive a cure, named Blank, which is about the size of a chipmunk and can rest inside Belt's sleeve. Blank is extraordinarily cute and able to perform tricks and dances no other cures can match. Belt's diffuse, episodic memoir details his struggles growing up, including a period when he destroys swing sets, and dealing with a rich bully named Jonboat. The story builds to Belt's unlikely friendship with Jonboat's son, Triple J, who is an aspiring writer and filmmaker. Other threads include Belt's complex relationship with his father, especially during his mother's illness, and the backstory of Triple-J's stepmother, a transgender performance artist and scholar. The narrative starts to feel bloated as Levin goes deep into the history of the cures, adding such metafictional pieces as brochures, research papers, and film transcripts. Despite the novel's slow parts, Levin creates a fascinating world with a wild and often touching coming-of-age story at its center.
