Mount Chicago: comedy, memory, anomaly

When people ask me what Adam Levin's new novel, Mount Chicago, is about, I'm tempted to respond, "It's about 600 pages long."

The length is an important detail I neglected to notice when I ordered the book. I'd read a review that made me think this novel could be a good reading assignment for my Concepts of Comedy class, but a 600-page novel in that class would wipe out half of the syllabus. I might assign a 600-page novel in an upper-level class full of English majors, but certainly not in a lower-level class full of General Education students. Unless I want to spend a month talking to myself about a novel no one else in the room has read, I'm not going to assign Mount Chicago in my Comedy class.

Which is not to say that it has nothing to say about comedy. In fact, the novel tackles a couple of my favorite questions: How do cultures memorialize tragic events, and what role can comedy play? The sections that deal with these topics are insightful and often quite funny, but they're funny in a way unlikely to resonate with my students. I mean, when the malaprop-prone Mayor says he wants a memorial more popular than Auschwitz but "less depressing," the laughter is not unmixed with pain.

But, on the other hand, there are plenty of poop jokes, plus a personable parrot named Gogol, a duck named Momo whose attempt to free his people--er, ducks--from their oppressors is thwarted by an untimely erection and who therefore becomes a comedian, and a comedian named Shlomo--er, Solomon Gladman--doomed by hemorrhoids to a miserable life that may or may not be redeemed by comedy.

It's complicated, in other words. The style evokes Vonnegut, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with massive digressions that tumble forward and backward and circle in upon themselves before reaching punchlines that are frequently worth the effort.

The longest digressions concern Apter Schutz, who seems at first like a minor character but, like the parrot named Gogol, steps up, demonstrating a powerful ability to make money through honest but not always honorable means and eventually becoming advisor to the malaprop-spouting Mayor of Chicago, who struggles to create the appropriate response to a disaster that swallows up a huge chunk of the city. 

 

This disaster is, more or less, the driver of the plot, such as it is. First, what to call the disaster? "Sinkhole" is accurate, but "Sinkholes were for Florida. They made you think of swamps and they made you think of armpits. Swampy armpits." The Mayor similarly dismisses "the seismic event" (too earthquaky), but finally Apter offers "the anomaly," which earns him a job as the Mayor's chief advisor, in which position he is placed in charge of developing the park that will serve as a memorial to the anomaly and become a more popular but less depressing Auschwitz, and off we go on a million digressions, some of which are rewarding and others not so much.

 

But I kept reading through almost 600 pages because that's what I do, and in that I resemble no one so much as the hardy Chicagoans described by their Mayor in response to the aforementioned anomaly:

We are, every one of us, all-star NFL linemen in our souls, and yes it is true that I wish, like I'm sure all of you wish, that there had never been any chapter that required our talent for this overcoming of it to be demonstrated, but we have demonstrated that talent, in spades, we have put our big shoulders to the task of tackling this chapter that needs to be tackled, we have tackled it in fact, and we will keep on demonstrating even more of our talent in even further spades, we will keep on tackling it till the game is over or it can't get up, whichever comes first, and if you want to know why, I will tell you why, even though I think you already know why: because this is Chicago and we are Chicagoans, and that's what we do.

So yes: I have tackled all the chapters, and I found something funny in all of them and sometimes something admirable and often something surreal or bizarre, but now I am done tackling chapters and I am closing the book.