The Magicians by Lev GrossmanViking, 2009

Quentin Coldwater is seventeen, smart, and not particularly happy. Not that he has too much to complain about: “I am a solid member of the middle-middle class,” he tells himself. “My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be” (p 5). But he can’t help feeling “that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy” (ibid.). Quentin thinks he should be somewhere else: ideally, someplace like Fillory, the Narnia-like magical land at the center of a series of British novels he read and loved as a child, and kept reading and loving as he got older. In Fillory, Quentin thinks, he would be happy; in Fillory, things would make sense.

With all his vague adolescent discontent, Quentin’s the sort of character it’s easy to be mildly annoyed by, though at the same time I couldn’t help liking him, too, and being pretty delighted when, early in the book, he has his own Narnia-esque experience, clawing through the trees of a strangely large community garden in Brooklyn to find himself suddenly elsewhere: upstate, in summer (it was November at home), on the grounds of a school called Brakebills. Brakebills is a college of magic, and Quentin finds himself getting invited to matriculate there. I love his initial hesitation, how amusingly apt it seems, what you’d expect from an over-achieving high school kid who’s been planning on the Ivy League: “Suppose it was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever” (p 39).

So Quentin ends up at Brakebills, which looks about like what you’d expect: picture a slightly more serious Hogwarts on this side of the Atlantic. He learns that magic is hard work, and also has the usual coming-of-age realizations: other people are people, not just classmates/competition; no matter where you go, there you are; a change of scenery doesn’t guarantee happiness. The Brakebills section of the book is really pleasing, and part of what’s pleasing about it is that it’s a story of magic that isn’t a quest story, or a story about the conflict between Good and Evil. (There is evil out there, and Brakebills isn’t entirely insulated from it, but, like in the real world, it isn’t always the focus.) After graduation, Quentin and his friends end up in Manhattan, where they drink and flounder and are aimless, magic meaning that they don’t need to worry about paying the rent or holding down jobs. And then things get interesting again, with the arrival of a Brakebills acquaintance who’s come into possession of an unusual magical object. After that, there is a quest, which isn’t quite satisfying—even to the characters themselves, and there’s evil, and there’s heroism, and things resolve themselves or don’t. I don’t want to talk too much about the ending, but for a good while I was worried I was going to find it wildly emotionally manipulative and annoying, but, rather to my surprise, it managed to redeem itself, mostly.