MOUNT CHICAGO

After a huge swath of downtown Chicago is swallowed up by a freakish sinkhole, an acclaimed Jewish novelist who had a brief run as a stand-up comic and an obsessive fan who becomes a mayoral aide confront their losses.

The novelist, Solomon Gladman, lost his entire family to the “terrestrial anomaly" (as city officials insist it be called), leaving him to obsess over the intensely neurotic behavior of his parrot, Gogol. Having become a clinical social worker, he is attuned to that task. The fan is Apter Schutz, who by the age of 21 made millions marketing a subversive desk calendar aimed at "real Americans," followed his hero into psychotherapy, and then went to work for a hapless mayor determined to build Mount Chicago, a memorial to the disaster victims that is "as moving as Auschwitz" but "less depressing." At the core of the novel—which, at almost 600 pages, is a walk in the park compared to Levin's 1,000-page opus, The Instructions (2010)—is an epic discussion of the meaning of survival that culminates in the soft, made-for-2022 notion that anyone who is even aware of a death "survives" it. Seemingly by design, the novel tests the reader's patience with long streams of obsessive musings on subjects ranging from pizza preferences to the films of Steven Spielberg (whom David Mamet, one of the real-life figures in the book, calls a "pretentious schlockmeister"). In his opening disclaimer, Levin says that " 'ideas' get in the way of art," but his art is all about how affirming it can be, during these times of Covid-narrowed lives, to dose on ideas. "I digress, therefore I'm alive" might be his theme—a deeply affecting one when all is said and redone.

A sometimes wearying but boldly rewarding work of metafiction.