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Sometimes, other people really sum up your thoughts more perfectly than you can—at least in a single statement:
 Dude just got his foot off everybody’s throat and now he’s back ALREADY.
That’s what Adam Novy (The Avian Gospels) said when McSweeney’s announced Adam Levin’s Hot Pink would ship out early to readers who ordered the book directly from them. And it’s true what Novy said—completely accurate and undeniable. It’s honestly impossible for me to think of a writer bringing half as much fire right now as Levin (and there is a ton of great writing out there right now).
If you slept on The Instructions, I’m sorry. Please remedy this as soon as humanly possible. It’s an honest-to-goodness 1,030 page literary event that violently hurdles its readers from cover to cover. The pace is bone-rattling.
Prepare to be jarred.
In Hot Pink, Levin has mixed up a special smaller batch of his “secret sauce†that worked so well in The Instructions, and then shrink-wrapped it all into ten individually packed serving sizes. The overall quality and polish of this collection are indeed top-notch. Hot Pink is the literary equivalent of a perfectly arranged music album that you can dial up, press play, and listen to from start to finish without skipping a single track.
But that shouldn’t imply that the tone of Levin’s collection is homogenous—far from it. Hot Pink showcases an impressive range. For instance, nowhere else will you read a story about a six-member faculty disciplinary committee charged with advocating for the rights of (ostensibly) fringe university groups:
…three of the committee members had defended the gerbiler assertion that GERBILS SEEMED TO ENJOY GERBILING, it is also true the other three members, while they readily defended THE LEGITIMACY OF THE DESIRE TO GERBIL, and even the possibility that gerbils themselves enjoyed THEIR ROLE IN THE PROCESS, were also MADE UNCOMFORTABLE BY THE IDEA OF SPEAKING FOR ANY POPULATION BEREFT OF A VOICE WITH WHICH TO PROTEST ITS OWN OPPRESSION…
—included in the same collection as a story highlighting odd friendships, the importance of nicknames, and greasy diner food:
The fifty-third day in a row we hung out, me and Franco got all these grilled-cheese sandwiches at Theo’s BaconBurgerDog from Jin-Woo Kim, who people call “Gino†cause we’re not in Korea or are in Chicago or people are lazy or two of these reasons.
Levin expertly weaves this selection of ten stories together written with precision and masterful use of vernacular and technical language, sometimes simultaneously, but never-ever awkwardly or incongruously. The collection flows seamlessly together and is cemented within a believable framework that always borders on the impossible but never crosses over. Hot Pink is a collection unmistakably crafted by a writer in full control of his style, shaping the language millions of Americans use on a daily basis into something wholly original.
Of course, similarities do exist between Levin’s writing and the writing of those writers who’ve visibly influenced him such as David Foster Wallace, Stanley Elkin, and Jerzy Kosinski to name just a few. However, Levin’s work never comes off as second-rate mimicry or a poor attempt at appropriating another author’s unique style. Instead, passages that call to mind other great writers feel like an homage with Levin’s own unique twist peppered in.
Readers who’ve read Stanley Elkins story “A Poetics For Bullies†might catch Levin’s subtle nod within certain passages of the title story “Hot Pink†such as the following passage featuring a pair of urban adolescent ruffians:
 I ran my hands back over my skull. It’s a ritual from grade school, when we used to do battle royales at the pool with our friends. We got it from a cartoon I can’t remember, or a video game. You do a special gesture to flip your switch; for me it’s I run my hands back over my skull and, when I get to the bottom, I tap my thumb-knuckles, once, on the highest-up button of my spine. You flip your switch and you’ve got a code name… Cojo’s was “War.†Mine was “Smith.†It’s embarrassing.
Levin demonstrates he’s indisputably comfortable writing about anything that lands on the spectrum that encompasses “human experience.†I.e. it’s a pretty damn wide spectrum. Levin appears as comfortable writing about the big picture as he is putting scenes under a microscope and dialing up the detail:
 We didn’t start with the bad guy. We didn’t start with any guy. All we had to write on were paper napkins, and the only pen Tom had was a floaty pen: there was a flat ski-slope in the water cylinder and when you turned the pen to write with it, a flat man in a flat ski cap descended the slope in slow motion. The pen was intended to be a souvenir of some place mountainous and fondly remembered. It was never meant to function as a writing utensil. Its cheap ballpoint would roll only under a heavy hand. I tore through the napkin, scratched a line into the countertop. The cook skipped the gratis cheese squares that morning.
 Hot Pink is gritty. It’s sharp and it’s flashy—and most importantly, it packs one helluva literary punch. When you dig something as much as I dig this book, you ultimately run out of superlatives. I seriously want to retype the entire collection here because there are so many great parts. The Oregonian called Levin’s The Instructions “addictively quotable†and that claim is just as true where his short stories are concerned.
In fact, you can quote me on that.
*
Joseph Michael Owens has written for various publications including Specter Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review and InDigest Magazine. His short collection, Shenanigans! was recently released by Grey Sparrow Press. Joe lives in Omaha with four dogs and one wife.