The Magicians

This book is just like Harry Potter!! . . . . . . . is what someone might say if they had not read any other books about magic besides Harry Potter.

This book is about a feeling. I'm sure many of us have felt this . . . you read a book about magic and adventure at a young age (usually 7 or 8) and you can't get it out of your head for the rest of your life. You think about that book constantly, and reread it in hopes of feeling that way again, but you never quite can.

Quentin Coldwater knew that feeling, and when he stumbled through an urban garden and ended up at Brakebills, a magical college in upstate New York, he thought all of his wishes were coming true. This was exactly what he had always wanted, but it couldn't live up to his show more impossibly (more impossible than magic) high standards. He attempted to fill the gaping hole with laziness, alcohol, and sex, but it eventually caught up with him, as these things tend to do.

This book is most of all an idolizing tribute to Narnia, and also to Harry Potter, E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, Earthsea, Middle-Earth, His Dark Materials, and all the other magical adventures I went on as a kid.

But Quentin and his friends are not Harry Potter or Peter Pevensie or Ged or Bilbo Baggins or Lyra Belaqua. They are not leaders or heroes. They are entitled, jaded, angsty, self-absorbed asses, much more like Holden Caufield or Tucker Max or Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Tomas from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The combination of these characters and the forementioned scenario is interesting, to say the least.

This book is ambitious, and daring, and weird. But I'll recommend it to all of you because we're all weird, daring, ambitious readers, and I am really looking forward to seeing what the sequel has to offer. I would be cautious about recommending it to anyone else. show less

Quentin is just an ordinary high school student hoping to make it into the college of his dreams when he accidentally stumbles into the strangest exam he's ever taken. Nevermind the fact that he doesn't know where he is or how he got there, but the test questions move about the page and his answers have a habit of coming to life and walking away.

It doesn't take long for him to realize that his greatest wish has been granted. Magic is real and he has been accepted to a magical school! Unfortunately magic isn't easy or fun and there is strange evil lurking around every corner. Will Quentin manage to reach graduation alive? And even if he does, what will he do with these powers he has painstakingly acquired? What is left to strive for when show more one can wave a hand and receive free money from an ATM?

This is Harry Potter for grown ups. It has fantasy elements, but this is not a Fantasy. The characters very much live in the real world and have to deal with the existential fallout of possessing supernatural powers. Magic is real, but life is still empty and relationships are hard. A thought-provoking book. show less

God, this book was so incredibly boring. By all rights, it should have been magically exciting, breathtakingly fantastical, but instead it was detached and full of a deadening ennui.

It's not a young adult book, no matter how the library has decided to shelve it. It is about college age kids, but it's about all the terrible parts of growing up at that age--the disillusion, the apathy, the anger, and the confusion of realizing that life is not going to be the way you thought you wanted. It's hard to even relate to the characters at all, because the narrative is all telling rather than showing. There's very little dialogue, and we are treated instead to long-winded expositions littered with SAT vocabulary words about what the characters show more are thinking and feeling, with explanantions of their conversations rather than the actual conversations themselves. You never get past the narrative filter to the actual people and events in the story--I felt like I was watching it all happen beyond a screen, squinting hard but never getting a really good, sharp view.

There were factual inconsistencies scattered throughout, and every scene opened with a small introduction about what was going to happen. As I read, I imagined a bitter man with a nasal monotone telling me this story; I imagine him as someone who thinks fantasy books are a bunch of rubbish and is keen to explain to me why magical worlds are just as terrible as he thinks our real world is--because it seems to me that Quentin is really just a stand-in for the author.

Even when they (finally, good god, the book just kept going on and on) end up in a magical parallel universe, I had trouble caring one way or another. It was all so deadpan and nonchalant, and throughout the book, the magic took a backseat to Quentin's whiny angst about his lovelife and generally irritating poor-me attitude. I hated him by the end, and I hated this book. show less

This was in a special category for me: books whose positive reception make me question my membership in the human race. After finishing it I stared at the glowing blurbs on the back, looked up some positive reviews online, and thought, who are these people? What could they have been thinking? How could they possibly be so different from me? After that it took a few days of solid social interaction with good friends to convince me that I actually had something in common with my fellow humans -- that they weren't a bunch of ineffable Lovecraftian things hiding in bodies that looked like mine.

(The most extreme version of this experience I've ever had was with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book widely praised but so staggeringly, show more contortedly bad that when I tried to review it, I got to 4300 words and gave up in despair because I hadn't even half exhausted all the issues I had with it.)

What The Magicians very clearly wants to be is a darker, more realistic, more laddish version of Harry Potter or Narnia, combining the cutesy, whimsical worldbuilding of children's fantasy with adolescent protagonists who are horrible little shits in the way real adolescents are horrible little shits. So far, so good, I guess -- I mean it could have been a really funny parody, at least. However, Grossman isn't really going for parody. His book is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and he seems to want the reader to feel invested in his characters and impressed with the psychological realism of his twist on the fantasy novel. Unfortunately, I was unable to rise to this task, because of the following basic fact about The Magicians:

Everything in this book is determined by Grossman's desire to imitate or respond to his literary models, not by considerations of human behavior. The characters don't act the way they do because real people (or even some distorted version of real people) would act that way, but because their actions contrast with the way Grossman imagines a "standard" children's fantasy character would behave in the same situation. The fantasy world(s) in which the story is set do not make sense, but are supposed to be impressive simply because they are darker and grittier than their literary models. If you stop thinking of everything as a genre joke and start thinking of it as an actual story about people, it falls apart completely.

This is especially bad because the Grossman yearns to be patted on the back for writing a "realistic" fantasy novel. But unlike, say, China Mieville, he doesn't try for realism by seriously thinking about how the darker side of human nature would play itself out in a magical world. He just takes a set of models (HP and Narnia), makes them darker and more vulgar (in implausible and nonsensical ways), and then, having conflated edginess with realism, sits back and expects us to be impressed.

For the first two-thirds of the book, the primary model is Harry Potter, and the primary "realistic" twist is that the characters in magic school are bored. Although the main characters are all very impressed with the idea of learning magic when they first reach the magic school (which as in HP resides in a coexisting culture kept secret by magic), they quickly lose interest and start spending all of their time drinking to excess, playing pool, and bitching about people they know and the general tedium of their little lives. This is kind of a funny idea, but the transition from curiosity to indifference is not made real. The characters simply go from one pole to the other in the course of a very short number of pages (covering months of in-story time). As with everything else in the book, Grossman seems to have been so pleased with his clever twist on his literary models that he didn't think he needed to make it psychologically natural. The characters are bored, and being bored is unadmirable, and that means it's realistic -- what more psychology do you need?!

The characters' incuriosity spares Grossman from having to fill in many of the details of his fantasy world -- if no one asks a question, the reader never hears its answer. Harry Potter also relies on this mechanism, but it makes much more sense there because the characters are younger. They enter magic school around age 12 -- an age when many people are still forming their basic worldviews. As a result, it's easy to imagine that they just take the existence of magic in stride, rather than going around grabbing lapels and demanding explanations. Grossman's characters, though, are 18 when the book begins, and it's difficult for me to imagine an 18-year-old who wouldn't freak out in some way when confronted with the existence of a hidden magic world. Remember, the characters are literally discovering a vast conspiracy -- wizards have been hiding magic from everyone for centuries. Why do they do it? Why don't wizards use magic to improve the world of ordinary humans? Harry Potter at least makes gestures towards answering these questions; The Magicians doesn't even do that, because the main characters -- bafflngly -- don't seem to give a shit.

Grossman even goes out of his way to specify at the beginning that his protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is a physics nerd who, at 18, is taking college-level advanced physics classes. (I was pleased to see him name-check Differential Geometry, which is exactly the sort of subject that such an advanced high school student might know a few things about.) Now, I also like physics, and if I were transported to magic land one of the things I would ask, in the course of my frantic label-grabbing question-asking "how can this be fucking possible?" tour, is how magic interacts with the laws of fundamental physics. I mean, physicists have developed these theories that seem to explain everything we can observe, and yet there's this extremely powerful force out there which could be harnessed by weird crusty old dudes centuries ago yet has escaped the notice of modern physics entirely? How?! Well, that's a question that Harry Potter sure isn't interested in answering, and one might hope that a book that fancies itself a grown-up HP, especially with a physics-nerd protagonist, would concern itself with it. Nope! Quentin doesn't care. He basically forgets about physics after the first few chapters. I understand that some people get less nerdy when they get to college, but come on -- at least show me the psychological process, Grossman. Later on there's a part where Quentin's studious girlfriend is working on a thesis about how to magically violate the uncertainty principle (ha!) and Quentin just thinks it's boring. Again, things work by the logic of cliches rather than the logic of psychology -- in the beginning Quentin is playing a nerd and later on he's playing a jaded college senior and his ostensible interests just adjust to fit the cliche of the moment.

Why are these people so unhappy? They are in college learning a fascinating subject, their personal lives seem to involve no special difficulties above and beyond those of the average privileged college student, so where's the problem? Grossman so thoroughly fails to provide a motivation (remember, it's dark, so it must be realistic) that it starts to seem like all of the characters, and particularly Quentin, are probably just clinically depressed. This raises the question, though, of why none of them even consider this. The book covers seven years of magic school in a few hundred pages, which is a pretty remarkable span of time in which to be miserable and never ever think about why (except "magic land didn't satisfy me like I thought it would" -- again, good genre subversion but bad psychology -- why don't they wonder why they are unsatisfied?). The characters start out as 18-year-olds with the maturity of 14-year-olds and end up as 25-year-olds with the maturity of 14-year-olds. It's conceivable that someone could change this little in seven years, but again -- give me the damn psychology, Grossman.

The only likable character in all of this is a sort of punk-ish nerd who the main characters all hate because he's really awkward, even though he spends all of his time doing interesting shit rather than drinking and bitching. Is this some kind of joke about how even in magic land (paradise for nerds?) awkward people will get treated poorly? But then we're supposed to sympathize deeply with the main characters and the difficulties they face as boring entitled assholes and I just don't get it. Where is my entry-way into these characters? I've read and enjoyed a lot of books about really awful people, but in all of those cases there was something that rang very true about the characters' particular brand of awfulness. Grossman's characters aren't awful in a way that feels real, they're just awful as a genre joke. Ha, bet you've never seen Harry Potter starring an asshole before! Nope, I haven't. But why is he an asshole? What's going on in his head? Come on, this is Creative Writing 101 stuff!

In the last third of the book we switch over from Potter pastiche to Narnia pastiche and there's some metafictional stuff and a bunch of thematic stuff I would probably discuss if I cared more about what Grossman is trying to do. But I don't. His handling of his themes is so crude and inhuman that I just don't care what he's trying to say.

There were a few scenes that I did really like, mostly those about elements of the fantasy world itself -- like a scene where the characters transform into birds and fly to Antarctica, or one about a powerful and sinister wizard who looks like Magritte's "Son of Man" painting. These scenes make me think that, ironically, Grossman would do much better if he tried to write a more ordinary, non-subversive fantasy novel. But this imaginative stuff never lasts for long, because Grossman has to keep us regularly updated on the characters' horrible lust triangles and how totally shitfaced they were last night. Blech. show less

This is NOT NOT NOT Harry Potter for adults. Unless by "for adults" you mean "for cynics." It seemed to me like Lev Grossmean was less interested in the story and more interested in letting all of us know that life is hard, i.e. even if there are secret, fantastical lands and awesome magical abilities, life can still be shit. There is no epic struggle between good and evil driving this book; instead it's driven by the ennui of the main character, Quentin, a college student with severe, cliched who-am-I? existential depression.

But I liked the book because Mr. Grossman's point was well-taken by this particular reader. It's true that the idealism of youth is often crushed by reality. It's true that many of us long for fictional fantasy show more worlds to be real, like that would be some magic ticket to a purposeful life filled with adrenaline and wonder. It's kind of cool to read a book that tries to take apart everything that previous fantasy novels have built up.

But the biggest shortcoming of the book is, as I said, that Grossman seemed too overtly message-y to me. Much of this book is ripped off (borrowed?) from C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, so it seems like he should've had some leftover brainpower to tighten the plot and make it all fit. Unfortunately, it didn't come together at the end at all, and it got a little boring. (Actually, here's my biggest disappointment: I thought it was great that there was no big evil nemesis-type character, and then one got thrown in at the end and I didn't think it made much sense.)

To sum up: I liked the thoughts it provoked, but the story does not earn the right to be likened to HP. show less

Because of the over-implied sentiment of "Harry Potter for Grown-Ups" I began with the impression that we'd be spending one-book-per-year in magic school, and the initial pacing once we got to Brakebills threw me off in a major way until I was able to recalibrate my expectations.

There are some really great things about this book. Firstly, Grossman uses good words. He actually uses these ten-dollar words so brazenly that, to my mind, it glides right past pretension and slots into a faith that his readers are bright enough to either already know them or be able to figure them out via context or Google if they really care. He uses them without being purple, because they are simply the most accurate word for whatever he's describing, and show more that is a talent.

Secondly, the fact that Harry Potter and ersatz-Narnia exist is fantastic because it is exactly what the readership is going in with. There's no pretending a fantasy-nerd culture doesn't exist. It makes their responses more real because they say what we would if we found out we were going to "be motherfucking magicians!"

For me there's also the painful ability to relate to Quentin's complete lack of satisfaction after leaving Brakebills. Precocious student leaves prestigious university and struggles with meaninglessness and the unforgiving unfulfillment of reality. Now that's a familiar story. show less

Novels with unlikable protagonists always frost me a bit. Here we have world-weary teens with no reason to be world-weary beyond their own shallowness. There's a great line of David Foster Wallace's of an Updike protagonist that "it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole." Quentin Coldwater never makes that mistake. He is, periodically, and in the end, entirely, aware that he's an asshole. But that doesn't make it any more fun to read about his aimlessness, his cowardice, his hedonism, his irritating hedonist friends, or his squalid betrayals and jealousies. I suppose one can't hold this against Grossman, but it was wearing.

Grossman's creativity keeps one reading. The geese, the antarctic show more training, the school ... all were nicely turned. The characters, less so. The physical kids just were so improbable, pointless, and drunk, holding on to their poses a touch too long even in the face of real danger and strangeness. And who let Sebastian Flyte into this novel?

A thought for another time: why must Quentin's parents (and Alice's) be so inhuman? What to make of the puzzling absence of, for lack of a better term, authority figures, in The Magicians. Is it just a way of highlighting the crisis of meaning that is at the center of the novel? show less