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readingrealgood's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
katsreads's review
way too long of a book for me to already be bored with the writing style by page 30
livrad's review
2.0
This novel circles around an acclaimed Jewish author/minor standup comic who is trying to write a book, when a giant sinkhole opens up in Chicago, killing a huge number of people, but thankfully not his parrot, Gogol. That sounds like a plot, right? Don’t get excited. There are hundreds of pages between mentions of the sinkhole.
Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and this feels like a never-ending episode—with absolutely zero humor, and if all of Jerry’s monologues were about patterns of bird grooming. If you love the idea of a bird obsessively over-grooming for pages and pages and pages, have I got a book for you. And every character is purposefully the same person, and despite the fact that author says, “They aren’t me,” they’re him. And yes, “the author says,” as occasionally he breaks the fourth wall to talk about what’s happening with him and his wife while he’s writing the book. And, his own voice is identical to every single character.
One of the charms of this book is that lava could flow over it, destroying a number of pages, and you wouldn’t need to worry, because you wouldn’t miss anything. There is barely a plot. It is just the same things being discussed for 25 pages at a time—the same sentences and arguments ad nauseum. There are some tangents (actually the whole thing is a stream of anti-PC tangents) about drug trips and deficating, but then we get back to the real story of the book: parrot grooming.
There is a bonus of what feels like a psychology textbook copied and pasted right in the middle. If fact, the whole experience feels like a psychological exercise: what exactly can the author put in this book and yet the reader will keep going. You know how when someone says a word so many times, they start to question how weird the word is and if it even means what they think? This manuscript reads like a dare: how many times can I use the word feathers, Indiana, eye movement, face, etc. in one page before either my editor or reader throws it against a wall? Let’s just say, this book’s editor has remarkable patience (and questionable judgement).
It isn’t just me. Kirkus said, “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.” I did have to look up reviews of the book, because I felt like I was just missing the whole point, but thankfully I felt validated by the Chicago Reader, “the reader suffers through almost 600 pages of masturbatory meta riffage meant to be funny.”
The meta experience is the point of the whole book, which is most likely a parody of literary fiction. But, you have to really be in the mood to applaud the author for how clever and subversive he is for 600 pages.
Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and this feels like a never-ending episode—with absolutely zero humor, and if all of Jerry’s monologues were about patterns of bird grooming. If you love the idea of a bird obsessively over-grooming for pages and pages and pages, have I got a book for you. And every character is purposefully the same person, and despite the fact that author says, “They aren’t me,” they’re him. And yes, “the author says,” as occasionally he breaks the fourth wall to talk about what’s happening with him and his wife while he’s writing the book. And, his own voice is identical to every single character.
One of the charms of this book is that lava could flow over it, destroying a number of pages, and you wouldn’t need to worry, because you wouldn’t miss anything. There is barely a plot. It is just the same things being discussed for 25 pages at a time—the same sentences and arguments ad nauseum. There are some tangents (actually the whole thing is a stream of anti-PC tangents) about drug trips and deficating, but then we get back to the real story of the book: parrot grooming.
There is a bonus of what feels like a psychology textbook copied and pasted right in the middle. If fact, the whole experience feels like a psychological exercise: what exactly can the author put in this book and yet the reader will keep going. You know how when someone says a word so many times, they start to question how weird the word is and if it even means what they think? This manuscript reads like a dare: how many times can I use the word feathers, Indiana, eye movement, face, etc. in one page before either my editor or reader throws it against a wall? Let’s just say, this book’s editor has remarkable patience (and questionable judgement).
It isn’t just me. Kirkus said, “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.” I did have to look up reviews of the book, because I felt like I was just missing the whole point, but thankfully I felt validated by the Chicago Reader, “the reader suffers through almost 600 pages of masturbatory meta riffage meant to be funny.”
The meta experience is the point of the whole book, which is most likely a parody of literary fiction. But, you have to really be in the mood to applaud the author for how clever and subversive he is for 600 pages.
dllh's review
4.0
Picked this one up as soon as it was available, as I've very much liked Levin's other work. I loved it. It made me laugh uproariously, it made me roll my eyes, and most importantly, it really got my brain cells firing. The books that give me the non-somatic equivalent of a tingly brain are the ones I tend to gravitate toward, and e.g. thinking about this book as a book about how we relate as human beings through stories provoked a real tingle. I won't be so bold as to suggest that that's what the book is "about" (another thing I like about Levin's books is that I mostly take them to be pieces of art rather than being capital-A About things), but it's part of what the book got me thinking about, and that was fun.
niftypifty's review
dark
funny
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
kpdoessomereading's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
benttravers's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
bettyvd's review
4.0
Heerlijk proza dat ons meeneemt in de wereld van een /de schrijver, zijn fan en zijn parkiet. Hoe bepaalt de parkiet wie de dominante is in het duo met zijn/haar baas? Hoe niet/leven na massaal verlies? Maakt een goede therapeut zijn ongelukkig? Enz. Een gul boek.
gracefulege's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Mental illness, Suicide, and Excrement
chamblyman's review
4.0
3 & 1/2 Stars. Is Mount Chicago a piece of Disaster Lit with its terrestrial anomaly sinking downtown Chi-town? Autofiction, since Levin himself is one of the subjects? Metafiction whose layers of narrative are in conversation? IMHO, it is all this and more. It is very funny, very smart, and very thoughtful. Levin continues to get purposefully lost in the literary jungle where D.F. Wallace, Helen Dewitt, George Saunders, and Jonathan Lethem have gone before.