The narrator, central character, and putative author of Adam Levin’s The Instructions is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a precocious, charismatic, violent boy whose friends and followers refer to him, respectfully, as Rabbi. In November 2006, when the events of Levin’s 1,030-page debut novel take place, Gurion is a ten-year-old seventh grader attending Aptakisic Junior High, in the northwest suburb of Buffalo Grove. He’s supposed to be restricted to an in-school program for incorrigibles called CAGE, but in the following passage he’s managed to get hold of a hall pass.
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A hall-pass was the only thing that would prevent thinking in a guard if they saw you in the hall and it wasn’t lunch or a passing-period; even if you were throwing up or bleeding out of the head, they would send you to the Office if you didn’t have one. The guards were like fingers, like robots. Like the Angel of Death that spread the tenth plague in Egypt. God sent it to kill the first-born sons of Egyptians so that the Israelites would be freed from bondage, but the Israelites still had to put sheep’s blood on their doors so that the angel would pass over their houses. If there was no sheep’s blood on the door, the angel would kill your first-born son even if you were an Israelite because even though it was one of God’s fingers, it was still just a finger, and a finger’s just a robot, and all the robot knew was to kill firstborns where there isn’t sheep’s blood. . . .
But I didn’t need to see Floyd, anyway. I didn’t need to go past the side entrance to get to my locker. I needed to go past the front entrance, and that was guarded by Jerry the Deaf Sentinel, who wasn’t deaf, but never listened. He just sat on a stool in a glass booth and kept a pencil he didn’t use in the space between his head and his hat-band. I disliked Jerry a fraction less than I disliked Floyd, but it wasn’t so easy to figure out why.
