I enjoyed this a great deal. Not so much the big ideas, but rather the little things. Particular sentences or passages. Phrases like "Harpo progression", "hyperscoot", and "Slokum Dies Friday". Elaborate setups around impressing a girl could go on for ten or more pages and I loved them.

I knew going in that the book was nearly 1,100 pages long, but at around 800 pages in I was doing that Chevy Chase head-bob move at the Grand Canyon in "Vacation". I kept thinking, "Let's get on with it already," so I rushed through 100 pages or so to get to the concluding 100 pages, which were both frustrating and exhilerating.

I had trouble getting over the fact that no 10-year-old kid in history has ever talked like Gurion, even if he is (maybe) a messiah. I would have given "The Instructions" 5 stars if it were 300 pages shorter and if the kid wasn't such an asshole. ( )

Excellent novel, detailing about four days of an eleven year old Israelite boy, permanently on detention at his school, who has such an effect on those around him that it leads him to question whether he himself could be the messiah? Adam Levin really captures the childish mind, describing the inner thoughts of Gurion, which justify his decisions with a childish certainty and short-sighted logic. The boy is very learned in Jewish literature, and approaches adults as his peers, seriously discussing the Torah, and ways of running the school. It is only as the book goes on that we learn of the difficulties he has endured; racism, incorrect psychiatric diagnoses, banishment from past friendships, his father's high profile lawyer cases, and his parent's divorce.
"I'm attention deficient...my conduct is disorderly and I'm hyper. Also I explode intermittently."
Parallels can be drawn with "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time".
"Gurion takes his diagnoses to heart [conduct disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, antisocial personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder],...he does so to his detriment - affectionately embracing one's symptoms is unlikely to aid in the cause of overcoming one's disorders, it would not be therapeutic."
There's even some Klingon language used in the text: "jIH muSHa' Daj tlhej Hoch wIj tIq". ( )

This is a good book, and long. It's certainly not conventional. I added it to my to-read list when it was new nearly a decade ago, and it came up on the wallace-l email list recently, with someone citing Levin in this book as someone working in a similar vein as Wallace. Well, he's no Wallace, but this is a heckuva book. It's hard to describe it, really. I didn't love every moment of it. Sometimes it drags a little, and about halfway through, Levin ramps up the characters' meta-thinking (meaning inward spiraling thinking about thinking) in a way that's familiar to and that resonates with me but that got a little tired as it kept being repeated. The book didn't connect with me emotionally or even intellectually on the whole, but it's still a neat book. It sometimes put me in mind of Barth's Giles Goat Boy. ( )

I'm told I don't want to finish this right now.

I'm not yet sure what to make of this, but it was at the very least wildly entertaining. (Levin even made me laugh with a list of names, which wouldn't usually work on me.) Many of the digressions and vignettes and little observations are funny or interesting or satisfying in their own right, without seeming shoehorned in. And I don't think the uncomfortable, violent parts were gratuitous; they were necessary to jolt us out of the complacency Gurion had somehow lulled us into, despite heavy foreshadowing right from the beginning, and the darker tone signalled by the very first conversation of part two (Gurion's startlingly cold domination of Sandy).

I've read and enjoyed some of the reviews here, and I hope to write one myself eventually, but for now I'll start with some lingering questions.

June: as someone else noted, I don't think we ever really get to know her. Is this simply because Gurion, for all his intelligence and passion, doesn't really need her to be a whole person? In reality is she ultimately just a victim, as Jelly's email suggests? It sounds like she's desperately trying to double down on her faith in Gurion, because the alternative -- that she's just a murderer who fell under the sway of a fanatic -- is unbearable. (Which reminds me of Gurion's earlier line to her, to the effect that she wanted to prove herself crazy because that would allow her to disbelieve what she knew about the world. Is this the mirror image of that?) And what went on inside her, and between them, when she threatened to leave if Gurion returned to the gym, only to be back at his side in the next scene?

Slokum: why does he fade out so anti-climactically, having been set up as a larger-than-life, supervillain-like antagonist? To Gurion, he seemed to represent the temptation to abandon principle and faith, and sink into nihilistic sociopathy (as opposed to the fanatical, idiosyncratically scrupulous sociopathy that is more Gurion's style). Gurion must have set him up this way for a reason, so presumably there is meaning in Slokum's final confrontation with Benji, and even in the fact that he disappeared from the book at that point. (Does the contrast between 'Slokum dies Friday' being settled with non-fatal violence, and the deaths that happen around this confrontation, say something about the difference between Benji (and even Slokum, for all his self-presentation as a bottomless pit??) and Gurion? For Benji, talk of 'dead kids' and threats to kill were mostly the usual childhood stuff, albeit from an unusually violent child, whereas others under Gurion's influence have the fanatical emptiness to follow through?) Certainly Slokum was a device to create tension between Gurion and Benji, and by making a decisive break from his detente with Slokum, Benji sacrificed his own principles in order to make what seemed at the time like a decisive signal of loyalty to Gurion. But is there symbolism in the way Slokum's story ends, or is it just a thing that happened?

Mookus: despite always being on the fringes, he seems to fade further into the background, even during the weird setpiece of his soundtracking the violence in the gym. What is the significance of his late shift away from prophetic rambling insanity toward normal speech? Was he ever more than an excuse for Gurion and his friends to feel righteous while doing violence? ( )