2013 read #50: The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
402 pages
Published 2006
Read from April 22 to April 23
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The phrase that most often got attached to this book was "Harry Potter for grownups." George R. R. Martin, in one of the cover blurbs, claims that The Magicians is to Harry Potter as "a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea." That blurb in particular, and the Potter comparisons in general, are overselling the resemblance just a bit. Sure, about half of The Magicians largely takes place at a magical academy sequestered out of sight in a bucolic region, but that's just the start, and in any case Brakebills doesn't resemble Hogwarts so much as an upper-crust liberal arts college experience, complete with student clubs focused more on drinking and debating insignificant bullshit with friends (and sleeping with each other) than on academe.

Near the end of their Brakebills education, one character despairs over the lack of any meaningful post-academic future. Her magical parents study the minutiae of fairy music or redesign their house every few years to duplicate historical dwellings in all their anachronistic inconvenience. "That's exactly the problem," she tells the POV character. "You don't have to do anything.... You don't know any older magicians except our professors. It's a wasteland out there.... You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters."

Magicians in this world natter along and collect obsessions so they don't go crackers over their own useless over-specialization, just like those of us with (cough) anthropology degrees. Overall, then, the first half of The Magicians seemed to me to have more in common with a grad school-set Bildungsroman than with any of Harry's adventures. It is the common pre-2008 story of privileged white kids worrying about their own superfluity as they drink and fuck and jockey for social position. Take away the magic and you have an almost uncannily mundane depiction of college life.

But that's just the opening half. After the graduation, The Magicians becomes the Narnia fan-fiction it had threatened to become since chapter one, only it's fashionably dark and gritty reboot fan-fiction. I was prepared to roll my eyes at this section, with it de rigueur everything-sucks-and-everyone-is-miserable predictability, but a simple-minded talking bear getting methodically wasted on peach schnapps and a walking birch tree smoking a cigarette won me over. My one complaint is the surfeit of amateur-hour Bret Easton Ellis impersonation thrown in along the way -- which, however boring I found it, I must at least admit was in character. (Incidentally, I think I've teased out why "rich society kids do drugs and fuck each other and die in car crashes" fiction is so fundamentally unappealing to me. My first eighteen and a half years were objectively shitty by first world standards, and I have zero patience for the drama of kids so privileged they must sabotage their own lives to experience any adversity.)

Even here, Grossman redeems himself by being almost eerily adept at describing the rotten, poisonous sensations of jealousy and heartbreak, the self-destructive nihilism that comes with seeing a relationship failing around you and being powerless to change its course. In fact, regardless of the self-indulgence and affluent self-pity of the central character (and the utterly predictable ending), The Magicians was possibly the most moving and emotional book I've read so far this year.