Book Review | 'The Magicians,' by Lev Grossman (original) (raw)

Abracadabra Angst

Sept. 8, 2009

Fantasy novels involve magic and are a little bit like magic themselves. To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions. They affect us most powerfully as teenagers, but then most of us move on to sterner, staider stuff. Yet we carry the memory of the reading that first transported us, and no book ever quite has that flashlight-under-the-bedsheets urgency.

Lev Grossman’s third novel is a homage to that early wonderment. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is a Brooklyn teenager obsessed with “Fillory and Further,” a Narnia-like pentalogy “published in England in the 1930s.” One day, after his alumni interview for Princeton is aborted, he’s mysteriously conveyed to Brakebills College, which is kind of like the M.I.T. for magic. Even though Quentin discovers that magic is eminently real and that he’s got talent for it, he still pines for the imaginary land of Fillory. There are even hints that Fillory might exist. Worlds within meta-worlds. Does it surprise you that Grossman’s bio states that he “holds degrees in comparative literature from Harvard and Yale”?

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Credit...Illustration by Jared Andrew Schorr

Brakebills will remind readers of Hogwarts, though with more illicit fondling. Grossman has written what could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults. He takes the rudiments of that story — an alternate society of magicians bumpily coexists with our own — and injects mature themes. Quentin and his circle sleep around. They cook great meals and slosh wine. They also mope about and ponder the purpose of the magical life. It turns out that it can be kind of boring. You have great power but no meaningful way to apply it. Kind of like comp lit majors, or faded rock stars.

Grossman’s story is most entertaining when documenting life at Brakebills. The school has a cantankerous dean whom I particularly liked. “Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?” he asks, not unreasonably. Grossman, the book critic for Time magazine, is also very good at imagining what magic might feel like when trying it for the first time. There’s an amusing interlude where — spoiler alert! — half the class gets turned into geese and they fly to the Arctic. When everyone is back in human form, they all make honking jokes.

It’s the original magic — storytelling — that occasionally trips Grossman up. Though the plot turns new tricks by the chapter, the characters have a fixed, “Not Another Teen Movie” quality. There’s the punk, the aesthete, the party girl, the fat slacker, the soon-to-be-hot nerd, the shy, angry, yet inexplicably irresistible narrator. Believable characters form the foundation for flights of fantasy. Before Grossman can make us care about, say, the multiverse, we need to intuit more about Quentin’s interior universe.

The Narnia books and the Harry Potter series captivate the young by putting young people in a world where adults are a distant, unsteady presence. “The Magicians” is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life. Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?

THE MAGICIANS

By Lev Grossman

402 pp. Viking. $26.95

Michael Agger is a senior editor at Slate.

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