You know what's annoying?
Experimental short stories.
You know what else is annoying?
Adam Levin. He is 35 and grew up on the North Shore. He is talented and can't do anything half-
way, which makes him frustratingly, endearingly bold, the twin brother of annoying. His acclaimed first novel, “The Instructions,” was a roughly 750,000 page story about a teenager who leads a revolt inside the Chicago Public Schools; his latest, “Hot Pink,” a collection of stories about twisted romance and family problems, Chicago thugs and well-meaning inventions, is about 200 pages long.
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Though some of these stories head off into experimental realms, taking the form of game instructions, featuring oodles of marginalia, it only took me a few trips on the 147, from Rogers Park to Michigan Avenue, to read the whole thing. It wouldn't have taken me even that long except I spent a lot of time folding back the cover (I was reading a paperback galley from the publisher) so no one could tell that the title of my book was "Hot Pink." The words are splashed across the cover in monster type.
You know what's annoying?
That the people on Amazon who are buying Adam Levin's books are also buying a disgustingly hip selection of writers: Everything by Roberto Bolaño. Everything by Ben Marcus. Everything by Miranda July. Essays by Jonathan Franzen. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" from Nathan Englander. The stories of George Saunders (Levin's mentor in the Syracuse University writing program). The cult legend Charles Portis. The great magazine writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. And, of course, David Foster Wallace, whom, Levin told me, "is one of those loud voices, like Saunders and Salinger, that is always in my head."
Haven't these people heard of Hemingway?
You know what's annoying?
Adam Levin hasn't read "The Help."
"Why not?" I asked, furious.
"Is it important?" he asked, confused.
"Culturally, maybe," I said.
"I saw 'Drive' on the plane," he said.
You know what's annoying?
Adam Levin considers Hemingway experimental. And he's right. The other day, after teaching a writing class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Levin told me: "We think of Hemingway as being really straightforward, right? But he is not at all straightforward. He is pared down behind reality. I think with short stories you find your voice and style from piece to piece. You want to find an interesting way to tell this story, then that story. So I really do sit and write sentences in order until a story arrives. That really is my method. And then I strip away some sentences until I arrive at something I like. I don't think you sit down to write a short story about a puking doll that's also a coming-out story ("Frankenwittgenstein," the first story in "Hot Pink"). I started with a story about a puking doll. Actually, in the first draft, the story was a product description of the doll. I thought 'Now I'm done!' But I wasn't (expletive) done at all. So then it becomes a story about the guy who invents the doll. Which becomes a story about the guy's son. Which becomes this coming-out story. But there is no reason why you couldn't write that story as a product description. I just couldn't do it at that moment. My friend Sal (writer Salvador Plascencia) got into MFA programs by writing imaginary job applications. Now, I love stuff like that, but when it doesn't work it can be the most obnoxious stuff on Earth."
You know what's annoying?
Adam Levin may be the only writer in the last 10 years to come up with an original (and sneakily generous) way of explaining the difference between Democrats from Republicans. In his story "Finch," a man offers this for test: "Do you think our new mayor Richard M. Daley is a funny guy who makes a lot of clever plays on words when he talks, or do you think he's more like an illiterate, nonsense-speaking midget with a really red face?" (Answer: Democrats go with the red-faced thing. Republicans appreciate a good malapropism.)
You know what's annoying?
Footnotes in novels.1
You know what's annoying?
Adam Levin is an experimental writer who hates that word — "experimental."
What would you call it, I asked.
"Good?" he replied.
It's generally associated with youth, I said. The I-Climbed-It-Because-It Was-There School of Writing.
"If you mean the readership (for experimental writing), that's accurate. In terms of the writing, I'm not sure. You may be more willing to experiment when you're young — you get an inflated sense of things and want to rebel. But the best writers are the ones who will to change up their (expletive) all the time. You get older and you see the value of telling a story, but I hope I never get to be one of those old men who likes saying, 'Just get to the tale, boy!'"
cborrelli@tribune.com
Hot Pink
By Adam Levin, McSweeney's, 256 pages, $22
1 "I'm OK with footnotes, I really like footnotes," Levin said, which was the wrong answer. I don't think my hating them is about my lack of imagination, I replied. They're distracting, they break the flow, they appeal to my distracted nature. Probably exacerbate it. I don't need that. Of course, you use footnotes well. Levin said, "They can be annoying. You're right. There aren't that many footnotes in 'Hot Pink.' Maybe 13 or something? The gesture is asking the reader to do a little more work than they were expecting. So each time out it has to be worth it. It needs to be exceedingly important for me to have a footnote in there. They're a risky move and the payout for putting them in has to be tremendous. The question of whether a writer should do something edgy really boils down to whether they do that edgy thing well. If a writer is doing it to signify they are smarter than the reader, that's not something I want. But if the reader is open to the edgier stuff, it can be great. There are things in some writers' work that I don't understand exactly and it makes me upset. But not because I'm mad. It's because the writing is moving me in a way I don't entirely understand."
