The Magicians (Novel) Review
The Magicians, a novel by Lev Grossman, is classified as “new adult fantasy,” which immediately leads one to wonder, what is a “new adult,” and how does that differ from being a regular old “young adult?”
Allow me to explain, from my limited viewpoint. A young adult, really, isn’t an adult at all, but a young person on the cusp of maturity, which is why YA novels are largely about teens dealing with “grown up” problems. A NEW adult is someone who has reached society’s view of being adult (18 or so, much more likely to curse, drink, take drugs, and do violence) and is dealing with grown up problems… but is very bad at it.
So let’s look at The Magicians as New Adult. Protagonist Quentin Coldwater has just been recruited for Magician College. What? No, not Wizard School. Magician College. It’s completely different. He’s brilliant, anxious, and obsessed with fantasy novels, and therefore a stand-in for the reader, obviously. But instead of trolls in the dungeon and three-headed dogs, Quentin is mostly fighting listlessness and self-loathing.
And that’s weirdly brilliant. Because as wonderful as pursuing your dream (even a dream of magic) is, that initial excitement does fade. As much as Quentin loves magic, learning the thousands of pages of material necessary to cast a spell isn’t glamorous, and neither is entering the real world with a bunch of skills you’ve learned and no real way to apply them. There’s a reason JK Rowling never really talked about EITHER of those things in any of her thousands of pages: they’re grown-up problems. And predictably, the cast of the novel, like many young people, turn to alcohol, inadvisable relationships, and self-destructive streaks to cope with the very grown-up feeling of “is this all there is?”
So yes, another way of putting it is that the real magic is the depression we had along the way.
As New Adult fiction goes, this made an undeniable splash because it’s pitch-perfect. There’s nothing more New Adult in my mind entering the “real” world holding onto the idea that maybe this next thing will make me feel fulfilled. Maybe it’s my Magician College, or graduation, or an internship, or my passion project, or defeating that evil wizard over there. Dear lord, how nice it would be if feeling fulfilled were just a matter of shooting that evil wizard!
But it’s not. Finding lasting fulfillment is a lifetime journey, even with all the resources you could hope for. Building a fantasy novel around that longing is so clever…though it inevitably leads to poor pacing. The book’s very readable, but it’s filled with long sections of very little action followed up by intense bursts of drama. And as mature as the novel is about many grown-up issues, it’s strangely flippant about a sexual assault near the end of the novel in a way that I still think about months later.
It’s an unusual novel that accomplishes what it sets out to do, though not without its flaws. The sequels work to address those flaws, but we’ll talk about them later. For The Magicians, 3.85 very precise hand gestures out of 5.