The Instructions
- Sep 12, 2018
- 1 min read
★★★★★
Clocking in at 1,030 pages and having taken eight years to write, Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, is audacious, daring, moving, ambitious, hilarious, troubling, complicated, awe-inspiring, overwhelming, thought-provoking, slightly bonkers, and, as you might expect for a book of this length whose events take place over a mere four days, obsessively thorough. I loved every minute of it. And, despite the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list of adjectives I’ve already compiled above, anything else I’ve written (and, for all our sakes, mercifully deleted) fails to capture the wholeness and the fullness of this book. This is a special book, a singular book, a book that should be read by everyone. For various reasons, not least of which is its daunting size, most will not. That’s a shame, though, as elsewhere in this review, to say why would only serve to diminish the book’s exceptionality, undermine the experience of reading it, and trivialize the profoundness of its impact.
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