“Kid Positive”
by Adam Levin
from the March 2, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
I apologize that this is going up late. My server was having issues yesterday, and by the time it was fixed I was a long way down the work rabbit hole. But here we are, with yet another author whose name I didn’t recognize at first. Some cursory research on the web reminded me of Levin’s debut door-stopper The Instructions (over 1,000 pages!) that McSweeney’s published in 2010. I remember that event, though I never read the book. A couple of years after that he published a collection of short fiction, Hot Pink, and he will publish his second novel, Bubblegum, in April. Despite Bubblegum‘s page count being listed as 784 pages, “Kid Positive” does not appear to be an excerpt.
Time to dive back in the work rabbit hole! But please do feel free to leave a comment below. Do you like “Kid Positive”? How come or why not? I hope everyone is doing well!
I have to say I got lost in what to me felt like self-satisfied cruelty. It felt smug. I’m hoping I just got in a rut and that someone can point out the nuance of what was really going on. Otherwise, I thought this was pretty awful.
I agree. The entire time I was thinking “please don’t get any more pets, people!”
Levin’s doing a minimalistic thing where the reader is intended to ponder the nature of the narrative. Is this a sentimental reflection on childhood or a STORY about the sentimentalization of childhood? The move of having the first-person protagonist be named Levin and calling himself a behaviorist who doesn’t believe in free will opens up all sorts of portals for interrogation and close reading.
It’s more “clever” than “good” but the details are well-chosen and it’s all quite scrutable in the end. It’s easy to dismiss as just an ouroborusy little piece of pomo fluff, but in its interrogation of the nature of personality as a deterministic outcome this story is solid fodder for philosophizing.
Technique-wise, it’s not bad either. A little contrived, but it wears that as a self-awareness merit badge (realism is a game too, etc etc; kids grow up to have kids, etc etc; aren’t all literary authors behaviorists, etc etc) and so this is, overall, an easily digestible story that can also work as one that deserves deep parsing and re-reading.
Overall a thumbs up from me, if not for everyone and not all that memorable.
I really appreciate Sean H’s comments. I read story a couple days ago and thought it was clever, and definitely something to read closely, but for me there was little emotional resonance (though like many readers my age I immediately understood the relationship between children and animals as described). The last long paragraph-sentence, though, was sweet because the friends are just as aware as the reader is that the story and the inferences are made up. It is a well-crafted made up sentence, was my thought.
I thought perhaps the friends, in the last paragraph, were being cynical or perhaps didn’t believe the sincerity of “Levin” but how do you gather that they knew the story and inferences were made up? Did I miss something. Clearly, the nasty kids on the bus are on to his games but I didn’t get that in the last paragraph. I liked this on the same level as the last two readers.
I never enjoy stories where the tone is smug and condescending to the reader. It’s like a critic’s review of theater or art where the writer is full of himself, rather than on task.