CHICAGO — Adam Levin left Chicago a few years ago and moved to Florida, and if you don’t think that’s hilarious, you should meet Adam Levin. He grew up in Highland Park, taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and for the past decade has been known as an admired novelist of intense, big books with bigger ideas. He’s married to French writer Camille Bordas, who teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He studied at Syracuse University under (Oak Forest native) George Saunders, whose satiric, hallucinatory stories Levin’s own writing occasionally recalls. His first novel, “The Instructions” (2010, 1,026 pages) told the story of a Chicago boy who may or not be the messiah; his 2020 novel, “Bubblegum” (784 pages), imagined a “cute economy” in which consumers raise cuddly robots until they grow so adorable that their owners kill them. The only Florida thing about Levin is that he owns a Quaker parrot.
And even the parrot is named Gogol — as in Nikolai Gogol, Russian surrealist.
We’re talking an exhausting, demanding, difficult writer — but also, a very funny one.
“Mount Chicago,” his new novel (592 pages), is yet another ambitious swing for the literary fences, or at the least, a rollicking yet mournful stab at returning the sprawling American novel to Chicago, home of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” and Saul Bellow’s “Augie March.” I mean, this plot alone — you’ll wish you had thought of it. Some days you probably do: Much of downtown Chicago collapses into an enormous sinkhole.
Not funny, thousands die, but among the survivors are a celebrated comic, his biggest fan and the mayor of Chicago, who wrestles (in Strangelove-ian fashion) with the language to convey tragedy. (“Seismic” sounds a little too disaster movie for him.) Along the way, there are run-ins with Richard M. Daley and Perry Farrell and Ari Emanuel, the Rainbo Club in Ukrainian Village and the UIC campus. And a parrot named Gogol, and a writer named Adam Levin. It’s a ton of book, but also, a touching account of grief.
Levin spoke the other day on the phone from his home in (ahem) Florida. The following has been edited and condensed for length and clarity from a longer conversation.
Q: How important is it for you — not necessarily as a writer but reader — to laugh?
A: Maybe the most important thing. Except with one or two exceptions, a book doesn’t blow my mind unless it makes me laugh. That doesn’t mean every second. But a book — a novel — can’t do the stuff I love if it’s trying to teach something. As a writer, I want to be aware the person reading has to engage, and as a reader, if I’m laughing, it’s the quickest way to realize my own engagement. There are books I should read I haven’t because, when I start them, they don’t get their sense of humor across fast enough.
Q: I ask partly because there’s a lot of stand-up in this book, but also the sense you think about the art of stand-up comedy a great deal. Do you learn about writing from stand-up?
A: Yes. It is a completely different form, but like a novelist, I also don’t think there is a stand-up I adore who is being him or herself entirely (on stage). They are playing a character, even if it’s a hyper version of themselves. Their work is written, there’s timing, improv to a degree. But watching a stand-up, I’m not thinking this is an author talking to me. When it succeeds, stand-up is more direct, very fast but what separates it from fiction — to the advantage and disadvantage of fiction — is it turns faster. If Bill Burr wants to start talking about something else, he makes a face and moves his body. But I’m there for that voice. The world got more complicated by listening to him, and that’s what great novels should do, too.
Q: I know you’re influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, who could be funny, but there’s more hint of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in “Mount Chicago,” who were funny but, unlike Vonnegut, not often seen that way.
A: They were hilarious writers, and my grand, deeply uninformed theory on this is that we get taught to read literature in school and unless you get lucky with a good teacher, you are taught to read the way you might read a Bible or a Torah — that there is a lesson in the pages. But that’s not what great writers do. The reason people might not think of (Roth and Bellow) as funny is because them being funny was considered secondary to their importance, when in fact it was a driver of those guys. Not that they don’t have serious things to say or fashion new ways to view the world, but their avenue was often comedy.
Q: You just described Chris Rock, too.
A: One hundred percent.
Q: Tell me about choosing a massive disaster for Chicago. Of all the possible apocalypses, a sinkhole that then creates a gigantic Mount Chicago from all the debris seems unlikely.
A: I don’t know, man. It can’t happen. It’s the least likely way for the Loop to go. Chicago is on a fault line. But it’s not a threat apparently. Part of doing that was to create Mount Chicago. How could that happen? Not being a physicist or anything, it’s my explanation and I got to make up the rules of what would transpire.
Q: But then you do an interesting thing because, despite the magnitude of the premise, and how we think of disaster narratives, you move away from the disaster for long chunks of the book.
A: Because I didn’t want to write a disaster movie. I was more concerned with how the characters would respond, and though I have never suffered disaster like this, I imagine if all my family died among those thousands of other people — OK, call me cold but I wouldn’t be thinking of those thousands of others. I’d be thinking about the people that I lost and how (expletive) I was and I would be wrapped up into myself.
Q: Did something happen in your life that spurred the premise?
A: Probably. In the first chapter, a pseudo-autobiographical chapter, I write I am lucky in life. I am. I am an unscathed middle-aged man, and I have a lot of friends that is not true of. I have skated past all of it, but as I get older, I know something will happened that will destroy me. It has to. I was watching people suffer I was close to, so on some level I was trying to sort through and prepare. I was also going back to Vonnegut. The first line of the novel is the first line I wrote: “None of this happened.” The first line of “Slaughterhouse-Five” — an obsession for me as a child — is: “All of this happened, more or less.”
Q: Speaking of that opening chapter, you’re a character in it. Rahm Emanuel is also in it. Your wife shakes his “four-and-two-thirds-fingered hand.” Then Rahm mispronounces “Don DeLillo.”
A: DeLillo was getting a Chicago Public Library award. It was a big to-do, and I was invited and I was so in awe of DeLillo, so I stammered some compliments to him. And then Rahm comes up to introduce the award and he says “Don Duh-lee-lee-yo.” And he says that twice! Seriously! That actually did happen!
