The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Here's a question for you: Should it be considered cheating when an author pilfers parts of his plot from someone else's novel? I'm not talking about the stray borrowings or adaptations of incidents, which surely all writers do whether they mean to or not. I'm talking wholesale lifting of another author's story or scenario. Jane Smiley took King Lear, retold it as a modern tale, and A Thousand Acres won a Pulitzer Prize. Michael Cunningham transported Mrs. Dalloway to 1950s New York and also won the Pulitzer. More recently, for his The Raw Shark Texts Steven Hall replicated the shark hunt from Jaws, and had a best seller. It would appear that this is generally considered an acceptable practice, not frowned upon at all.

So when Lev Grossman's plot for The Magicians centers around the students at a hidden school of magic in the modern day, obviously mimicking the Harry Potter story, that's A-OK. And when the students (now graduated) gain entry to an alternate world which is a Narnia knock-off, Grossman is obviously just covering the fantasy bases. He also includes bits from the Oz books, Alice in Wonderland, John Crowley's Little, Big, and I'm sure from others which I didn't catch. Consequently, the book jacket hype and many reviews cast this novel as an adult Harry Potter, and unwary readers expect to be transported to a magical world of conventional fantasy, with its good versus evil escapism. Boy, are they in for a surprise.

Lev Grossman is up to something else entirely here. This is postmodern fantasy, you might say, with its students of magic being intellectually pretentious, jealous and snarky, chronically bored and unhappy, prone to excessive drinking and irresponsible sex. The focus is not on the fantasy elements (with none of those "thick" details that make Hogwarts and Narnia believable worlds), but on the angst of the characters, particularly of Quentin Coldwater, the central figure.

Quentin is unhappy at his home in Brooklyn, even though he is an intellectual "shining star" who is most surely about to be accepted to Princeton. Then he is recruited by a secret school for budding magicians, and it seems to him to be a dream come true. But then he is not completely happy there either. Something is still missing. He graduates. What to do next? He drinks a lot and betrays his girlfriend, who seems to be the one person who actually unselfishly cares for him. His childhood fantasy comes true when he finds that he can actually enter Fillory (patterned on Narnia). He believes that he can finally be happy there. But no. Etc.

I find this novel to be patterned more after Jonathan Lathem's Fortress of Solitude or Donna Tartt's The Secret History than on fantasy novels. I even perceive the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. All of these authors feature intellectually superior protagonists who never manage to be happy. I have never quite decided what the message is supposed to be here. That highly intelligent, sensitive souls are so above the rest of us that they are destined always to be seekers for happiness, never finding it? Do the authors consider themselves to be just such intellectually superior and sensitive souls? I have always suspected that to be the case.

Despite all this criticism on my part, I found the novel to be riveting. I stayed up late and woke up early to read it. Grossman can make you turn those pages, for sure. I love fantasy, but this is not fantasy any more than The New York Trilogy is mystery. (You could read my review of that, if you wish.) But I did enjoy this book very much; it is extremely well done.