THE MAGICIANS - Lev Grossman - Fiction

Perhaps the more we write about magic, the more it stays the same. Grossman's book has been described as fanfiction about fanfiction, as it uses a fictionalized and gently lampooned version of Narnia ("Fillory") to create its own fictionalized and utterly more street-savvy version of Harry Potter. Grossman's main character, Quentin, is a nerd from Brooklyn, a high-school senior interested in magic tricks as just another way to divert his precocious and overbearing intellect. On his way to a Princeton interview with his best friends, he gets shanghaied into an entrance exam for a magical college, simultaneously breaking open and confirming his dearest inner fantasies. Then, offered acceptance after a dazzling magical feat brought on by stress and sleeplessness and utter indignation, Quentin dithers, wondering whether he has perhaps been tricked into a second-rate magical institution, a community college of sorcery rather than Magic Harvard. This guy is great!

Really, Lev's biggest accomplishment is making Quentin so real, while also giving him enough of a hero complex to lend his later journeys plausibility. Quentin has a hard time accepting the reality of his situation, looks down on some of his peers, and takes a classmate's apology for fighting him as an excuse to tell him that if he tries it again, Quentin will fucking kill him. I love a wizard from Brooklyn. I only wish that more of this side of Quentin had bled into Brakebills, his magical college; a magician who introduces other magicians to rap? A magician with street cred? Quentin is a little too bookish for that, making his relationship with his nerdy girl-magician counterpart practically inevitable, but he also makes a lot of the same mistakes that other twenty-somethings do, throwing himself into his first relationship with gusto, floundering after college and diving headfirst into drugs, making sexual mistakes, and underestimating people until it's too late.

As the novel points out, and references frequently, the people of Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings are ultimately too strong, too willing to undertake pain and grief, and too committed to ideals about stewardship of other worlds and quests for unknown treasure. Quentin takes his defeats hard, and legitimately so. He takes years to get over them. He goes into hiding. He gives up his gifts. In Lord of the Rings, characters give up their entire families with one scene of tears, and a few wistful remembrances. While parent/child relationships are resolutely terrible across the board at Brakebills, friendships seem to mean a lot more.

I suspect we will never tire of reading about normal children realizing their inner magical abilities and riding off into great adventures and fascinating educations. However many times and in however many ways this story has written, it continues to be entertaining, even as certain aspects (the boarding-school nature of all magical academies, for instance, and their complete isolation from the outside world) are repeated again and again. It would be great to read about a magical university completely integrated into a regular one--a special major at State U, classes enchanted to look like business classes to outsiders, where students who have to deal with living, working, and playing among the mundane world are actually studying for a Bachelor's of Sorcery. The trick of putting all your wizards in one basket is too easy, and, as Grossman points out, doesn't prepare them for the endless possibilities and paradoxical emptiness of the real world, once magicians are thrust back into it. But a school where you're the only magician on your crew team, and you have to hold yourself back from casting Oars of Quickness? The story of the young magician is the story of the outsider, the hero, the student, and the adept all at once. Even if Grossman's characters suspect that they have lived too long to go back to Fillory, the story never gets old.