Little Magic in the Magicians

The dust jacket of Lev Grossman's latest novel, The Magicians, claims that it's an homage to The Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter novels. Having not read a fantasy novel in a long time and having heard that this was supposed to be a fantasy novel for adults, I decided to give it a try. It wasn't like there were other books in the series that I'd then feel obligated to read, I figured.

It turns out that there's a reason fantasy novels are generally presented in a series.

Fantasy novels, as Michael Agger points out in a recent review of The Magicians, "are a bit like magic themselves." He writes, "To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions." It requires many words to set up a believable situation where lions talk and trees walk. Harry Potter's adventures come with an entire history of Voldemort and an epic battle between good and evil. We feel like Harry's story is only a moment -- though a pivotal one -- in his world.

Grossman forgoes the set-up in his book. As a result, instead of creating a rich, albeit unbelievable world a la JK Rowling, Grossman compiles a series of disconnected fantastical elements to advance the plot along as his convenience. The book opens with the main character, Quentin, magically following a crumpled piece of paper to Brakebills, a magic school supposedly situated on the Hudson in New York state. He endures an examination, after which the Dean of the school explains that he's been admitted to magic school. This is easy to follow, but difficult to understand. Why is there a magic school? How long has magic been around? How many "magicians" are there? In targeting an adult audience, perhaps Grossman figured we'd have less tolerance of explication. But it's exactly because we're adults that it's more difficult for us to suspend disbelief.

Or perhaps Grossman was too busy making the novel's theme very obvious. In a nutshell, the novel is about the trials and tribulations of growing up. College, the real world, the fantastical magic world, is not really what it's cut out to be. There is no magical solution to life's problems. As if this weren't clear enough from Quentin's constant complaints that Brakebills did not fulfill his hopes of what he had expected it to be, one of the Deans gives a handy graduation speech to the students at the end of their time at Brakebills:

"I think you're magicians because you're unhappy...He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it...Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was?"

This would be a fine lesson if it were geared towards teenagers. However, Lev Grossman's target audience will likely find it trite.

The one compelling component of the novel was guessing the extent to which Grossman is satirizing elite colleges and universities. As both a Harvard and Yale grad, Grossman was probably a nerdy kid who found himself admitted to a strange, elitist world when he entered college. Some of the challenges facing his students sound a lot like the problems one might imagine a teenager "burdened" with brilliance, or wealth might have. For example, when the Quentin graduates, he bemoans his post-graduation choices.

"It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs...And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. any one of a thousand options promised -- basically guaranteed -- a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out?"

Poor Quentin. Magic can't solve all his problems. Unfortunately, this is a lesson most adults don't need a fantasy novel to confirm.

The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker

My negligence of this new blog only proves that I was undeserving of cindyhong.com. In the past few weeks I’ve been called away from the blog by my moving into a new apartment and by some LSAT shenanigans. Despite the lsat’s – (and a two day addiction to Top Law School forums) - I was able to read Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist.

This book is a work of fiction. But beyond that, it’s very hard to classify. Told from the perspective of a poet, Paul Chowder, The Anthologist contains background rather than a conventional plot. Paul is a known, but not star, poet who is anthologizing a book of poems, Only Rhymes. His failure to write his overdue introduction causes his long-time girlfriend, Roz, to leave him. Paul has no recourse but to write in his journal.

Readers are quickly treated to Paul’s stream-of-conscious thoughts, jumping from one topic to a tangentially related one. He writes like your ADD friend, only with more knowledge of poetry. In an especially introspective moment, he thinks, “God, I wish I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.”

As for the poetry, that is the real purpose of this book. It’s literary criticism for the layman, disguised as a novel. Paul seems to work out his thoughts just as an eccentric humanist might in real life. On the one hand, you get the feeling that Baker wanted to write a serious book on poetry, and—having trouble uniting his thoughts together in a coherent way—decided to transmit the disjointed bits through the voice of Paul Chowder. On the other hand, Paul’s voice is so earnest, so singular, that you feel like his ideas are truly original and worthy of your attention. Better yet, once you understand his points, you feel smarter too.

Paul’s key insights are that rhyme is good and that iambic pentameter is overrated. Instead, English poetry naturally consists of a four-beat rhythm where the last one is a rest. Paul entertainlingly opines:

“So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it’s all happened before. It’s all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can’t stand it and let’s stop and do something else.”

A mouthful, yes. But a provocative and illuminating one.