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.
