As in the Talmud, there isn’t much plot, just water-fountain tattle, summaries, lists and, interspersed, charts and strange doodled maps that only distract. Aptakisic Junior High, named after the chief of an extinct Indian tribe, isn’t quite the Babylonian academies, and Levin’s occasional insistence on the sanctity of a locker-lined hallway is laudable if a little ridiculous. Levin could have explored that approach, developing Gurion’s holiness into a genuine teenage theology wherein the popular kids are divinities and the outcasts the demons; or he could have exploited the metaphor of the inmates of the Cage as modern Israelis, presenting Zionism as a symptom of their immaturity. Instead, he bombards the reader with a surfeit of incident in adolescent Babel: “During Lunch-Recess, I sat at the teacher cluster with My Main Man Scott Mookus, Benji Nakamook, Leevon Ray and Jelly Rothstein. Vincie Portite would have normally been there too, but he had a longtime secret crush on a girl in normal classes — he wouldn’t tell us who — and once or twice a week he’d leave the Cage for Lunch-­Recess in order to look at her. No one who was there with me that day had to be except for Jelly. She was on two weeks cafeteria- and recess-suspension for telling the hot-lunch ladies there was a corn on her wiener and it hurt.”

Such trivialities hurt indeed. If an idea is “mental,” as in “crazy,” to Gurion it’s “dental.” Snot and spit, which saturate these sentences, are “gooze.” If one does or says a thing very “kaufman,” that means it’s kooky, though I’m not sure Andy would have approved. Unfortunately the illuminations of “The Instructions” aren’t the three millenniums of Jewish literature in a host of tongues but rather the very recent language of the American novel: hyperactive, hyper-reactive. Just as Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem’s Second Temple, was bad for the Jews, so is David Foster Wallace — Levin’s tutelary goy. Nebuchadnezzar, who decimated the First Temple, was said to have the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle but the head of a man, and Wallace wrote Nebuchadnezzarian sentences: similarly motley, mutant. Levin’s attempt to ape Wallace’s caffeinated chatter, to mimic that ferocious power, is unseemly and disastrous — an instance, almost, of a man playing God.

More than stylistically though, Levin’s conceit of a child genius misapprehended in a scholastic setting has to remind us of “Infinite Jest,” that account of the prodigy Hal Incandenza and his time at the Enfield Tennis Academy. But Wallace, like God, and even like the mere mortals who wrote the Talmud, opted for multiple perspectives, whereas “The Instructions” remains univocal — it’s all Gurion’s voice — and it ultimately devolves not into commentaries and interpretive apparatuses but into a vague ending involving a fudged miracle and an ostensible kidnapping by the Mossad. This all makes for a very long joke: a setup that lacks a punch line.