In one of the best reviews I've read in a long time, Garth Risk Hallbert of The Millions dissects Adam Levin's The Instructions and also provides a handy list of kid geniuses in literature. Kudos to Hallbert for doing something I can still only imagine doing: finishing The Instructions. It's been at my house for three weeks, still barely making a dent. But I do love the main kid, Gurion, he is cunning and witty and well, really just a memorable character.
Hallberg writes:
As any kid genius will, Gurion tap-dances all over the line between precocity and preciousness. Levin, who studied with George Saunders at Syracuse, clearly admires the miglior fabbro’s
demotic hijinks, and Gurion often achieves a Saundersish charm, both in
rat-a-tat dialogue and in casual stabs of description that bring the
world of junior high back like yesterday’s hot lunch. Ron Desormie
“taught Gym in shorts that his wang stretched the crotch of”—you pretty
much had me at “wang.” But just as often there’s an inability to leave
well enough alone (Desormie also “hummed out a melody with lipfart
percussion and aggressively dance-walked and thought it was strutting.”)But perhaps the best part is in the sidebar as Hallbert lists some of the most memorable kid geniuses in literature:
- Seymour Glass, Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
- Simons Everson Manigault, Edisto (1984)
- Phillip, A History of Luminous Motion (1989)
- Hal Incandenza, Infinite Jest (1996)
- Magid Iqbal, White Teeth (2000)
- Ludo Newman, The Last Samurai (2002)
- Oskar Schell, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
- Blue van der Meer, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)
- Billy Argo, The Boy Detective Fails (2006)
- Rumika Vasi, Gifted (2007)
- Saul Dawson-Smith, The Truth About These Strange Times (2008)
- T.S. Spivet, The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009)
- Ruprecht van Doren, Skippy Dies (2010)
- Gurion Maccabee, The Instructions (2010)
Any others that need to make the list? What about that Owen Meany kid? Maybe that's not considered literature, not sure.
