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Bubblegum
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins, Michael Crouch, Julia Whelan
- Length: 39 hrs and 8 mins
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Bubblegum
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Publisher's Summary
"Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest, and Bubblegum is a dazzling accomplishment of wit and inventiveness." (George Saunders)
"Levin's brains may have earned him a cult...but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open." (Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review)
The astonishing new novel by the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award-winning author of The Instructions.
Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day world in which the internet does not exist and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology - a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio - has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to but must find a way to live in.
At age 38, still living at home with his widowed father, Belt insulates himself from the awful and terrifying world outside by spending most of his time with books, his beloved Curio, and the voices in his head, which he isn't entirely sure are in his head. After Belt's father goes on a fishing excursion, a simple trip to the bank escalates into an epic saga that eventually forces Belt to confront the world he fears as well as his estranged childhood friend, Jonboat, the celebrity astronaut and billionaire.
In Bubblegum, Adam Levin has crafted a profoundly hilarious, resonant, and monumental narrative about heartbreak, longing, art, and the search for belonging in an incompatible world. Bubblegum is a rare masterwork of provocative social (and self-) awareness and intimate emotional power.
What the critics say
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune
"Admirably bonkers and fitfully phenomenal... As Levin’s previous novel, The Instructions, demonstrated even more amply (at 1,000-plus pages), you don’t come to this writer for elegance of proportion. You come for comedy, for sensibility, for style; and in this sense Bubblegum is prodigiously sustaining.... Levin can make the kitchen-sink ambition of midcentury postmodernism feel positively new, bidding fair for the maximalist mantle of a Pynchon or a Stanley Elkin. But Levin’s consuming interest in everyday subjectivity equally pulls in the direction of minimalism; what engorges the sentences here is actually the kitchen sink of consciousness.... When it’s humming, the pileup of plenitude and emptiness is as future-perfect as the Curio itself, the sound of the day after tomorrow.... Levin’s faith in his flesh-and-bone robots yields a stunning transubstantiation.... [His] brains may have earned him a cult like Belt’s, but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open." (Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review)
"Delightful... As funny, sad, compelling and exhilarating as anything on the internet or IRL...Levin unspools a story that dramatizes thinking to an extent that thought itself becomes as riveting as plot, but in which there’s also actual plot in abundance." (The Chicago Tribune)
"Fantastic... Deeply reimagines our world for better or worse... Huge and deep and dark and hilarious and trenchant and powerful and complex." (The Austin Chronicle)