The Magicians: Interview with Bestselling Author Lev Grossman

Photo by Elena Siebert

Why?

 

What’s not to like? The Magicians is a fantasy novel, billed as a kind of adult Harry Potter, written by a literary nerd who worships fantasy writers like CS Lewis, TH White, and JK Rowling. In Codex, Grossman brought a literary sensibility to the suspense novel, resulting in a thrilling literary page-turner (see my review here), and I couldn’t wait to see just what he'd add to the fantasy novel.

 

And I wasn't disappointed. What he added was reality: an exploration of the high price of magic practiced by real people in the real world where love, sex, death, and most importantly, responsibility, aren't so easily ignored.   

 

The Magicians introduces the brilliant and brooding Quentin Coldwater, a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY, who really should be happier than he is. He has two really good friends, a GPA that's a full point higher than most people even know is possible to have, and he can basically write his own ticket to the Ivy League. He should be happy!

 

But Quentin isn't happy. In fact, he's miserable and secretly obsessed with an enchanted land called Fillory, the magical, Narnia-like world of the Fantasy novels he loved as a child and is still unable to reconcile as a young adult. Like most people, he believes magic isn’t real – until, on his way home from an unusual college interview, Quentin is magically transported to Brakebills, an exclusive Ivy-League-like college for wizards, where Quentin discovers that even the joys of college and a thorough education in sorcery is still not enough to make him happy.

 

It's not until four years later, when Quentin learns from a Brakebills alumnus and rival that Fillory is real and can be accessed at the push of a button, that a chance at happiness and fulfillment finally seem obtainable. Excited by the prospect, Quentin, along with his friends, journey to the magical land of his beloved books to discover a world beyond anything they could have ever imagined.

 

The Magicians by Lev Grossman will be released in the US on August 11^th. You can order copies now at www.LevGrossman.com. You can follow Lev on Twitter @Leverus.

 

 

I recently met up with Lev Grossman and had a few questions for him about his work.  

 

Q. Quentin Coldwater looks and sounds a lot like me and a bunch of my nerdy book friends who have a love/hate relationship with certain books. What inspired you to write this character? Was it somewhat autobiographical?

Somewhat. Quentin is taller than me. And smarter. But I was a lot like that in high school. I worked all the time, I was obsessed with doing well in school, in a way that must have been kind of annoying to the other people around me. Also like Quentin, I was miserable and obsessed with fantasy. I was convinced that there was some other world out there where I would be happy, and it was just a mistake that I wasn't there – I'd been cheated somehow.

Q. You're an author and a critic – and presumably a gentleman. So I won’t ask which job is worse or better. But, in The Magicians, you seem to be playing both roles at the same time, and I can’t tell if your book is more a homage to or a critique of the Fantasy novel. In your first book, Codex, you did something similar, bringing a literary sensibility to the Thriller genre. Was this an intentional blurring of those lines?

Before everything else The Magicians is a fantasy novel. And it’s fun the way fantasy novels are supposed to be. Or I hope it is. I started working on it in earnest in 2004, in a two-year gap between Harry Potter novels, and I was just writing something I wanted to read. If it's not that then what's the point?

But you know, there's a theory that for a writer to find his voice he has to kill off his literary parents in his work, like Oedipus killing his dad. And yes, there’s a sense in which Rowling and Lewis get it in the neck in this book. In the nicest possible way. I do some playful sparring with them. But I think critique and homage aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Q. Clearly The Magicians is "in conversation" with Fantasy books by CS Lewis, TH White, and JK Rowling (what is it with these guys and initials? JRR Tolkien comes to mind as well). What does Lev Grossman add to the mix? What can readers expect to take away from your part in this conversation?

Lewis and Rowling are both young adult writers. I love the stories of Narnia and Harry Potter – I’ve read them so many times they’re embedded in my mental DNA – but reading them as an adult, you do have questions. What would it be like to be a magician in the real world? Our world, the one with cell phones and the Internet and sex and alcohol? Real beer, not butterbeer? What if there weren't any Voldemort, any ultimate evil? What would you do with all that power, if you didn't have a nemesis to fight?

And likewise what would life really be like in Narnia? If a bunch of kids really tried to intervene in a civil war there, what would happen? Would it turn out like WWII, or would you end up with something more like an Iraqi quagmire? I think that's my part in the conversation. I take those stories into the real world, and see how the real world changes them.

(Fun factoid: Rowling's publisher advised her to use her initials instead of her full name because they thought boys wouldn’t read Harry Potter if they knew it was by a woman. Rowling didn’t have a middle name, so she just added the K on the spot.)

Q. How do you think writers like Lewis, White, and Tolkien would fare in today's tough publishing world?

That's such an interesting question. Let's see. I think White would do very well. The Once and Future King has that real four-quadrant marketing appeal. But Lewis I imagine would get pigeonholed as a Christian writer. Meanwhile Tolkien would chuck the whole novel business and launch Middle Earth as an MMO a la World of Warcraft.

Q. Something I always wanted to know: Why do mainstream critics generally avoid Fantasy novels? Is escapism in Literature, or in life, really such a bad thing?

This is a subject of huge interest to me. And I have no idea what the answer is. It’s not just critics but the academy too. You'll see classes on SF and detective fiction, Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. But fantasy – like romance – is still radioactive. Critics won't touch it. They consider it infantile and sentimental. They can't see the richness there.

Q. (This has nothing to do with your current book, but I wanted to ask you this five years ago when I reviewed Codex.) How do you think the Internet affects your jobs as writer and critic? To me, it seems a lot tougher for writers, especially mid-list writers, to land a major print review these days. And getting a print book review job is no cakewalk either – the few that are even worth it, that is.

Well, the pie isn't expanding. Obviously there's less print coverage for books than there used to be, so it's tougher to get coverage there. But conversely there's a book review boom in the blogosphere and elsewhere, so I feel like everyone gets reviewed somewhere, even if it's just on Amazon. We professional critics are trying to figure out if we still have a role to play, and if so what that would be.

What I find really weird is, as a writer I have to be present and available on the Net all the time. I blog, Twitter and Facebook, and so do most of the writers I know. You’re not supposed to be reclusive anymore. Look at William Gibson. The guy emits tweets like, I don't know, a quasar emits radio waves.

Q. What books are you reading right now (not for work)? Which writer or writers do you think deserve more attention than they currently receive?

I hate to admit it, but I don't read much that’s not for work. I can't. I'm not actually a very fast reader, and I have to power through a few books every week, so my waking minutes are carefully allotted to various books I’m considering for review. I have to constantly be sucking down pages. Not that I'm complaining.

But I will say, I've been reading Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, and I can't stop. I don't know whether I'm reviewing it or not, and I don't care. It's not often that I read a 600-page novel for pleasure, but I can't help it. Damn you to hell, Joe Abercrombie.

Q.What’s next for Lev Grossman?

Right at this moment my nerves are completely shot, waiting for the book to come out. I’m heading to WorldCon in Montreal in a couple of weeks. Then we'll have a tour in August – New York, Boston, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, LA. Then I expect I'll be sent to a sanitarium for brain fever and emerge a shadow of my former self. Then maybe I'll think about writing the sequel.