Talk to The Magicians like its author wrote you back.
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The Magicians, in detail
The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant and deeply unhappy teenager from Brooklyn, who discovers that Brakebills College — a secret school of magic — is real, and that the fantasy world he's been obsessed with since childhood, Fillory (a Narnia analogue), is also real. This should fix everything. It fixes nothing.
Grossman's novel is a systematic dismantling of the comfort fantasy provides. Quentin is depressed, not because his life is bad, but because depression doesn't work that way. Getting into magic school doesn't cure him. Learning actual magic, which is hard and exhausting and nothing like Harry Potter, doesn't cure him. Getting to Fillory, when it eventually happens, doesn't cure him. The book's central argument is that the things we use fantasy to escape from will follow us wherever we go, including into the fantasy.
The novel is deliberately written in the register of literary fiction — Grossman was a book critic at Time for years — and the Brakebills sections in particular have the texture of a campus novel. The magic system is interesting: it's not beautiful but technical, a matter of specific hand positions and mental disciplines, more like learning a foreign language than casting spells. The book takes seriously the idea that magic, if real, would require years of grinding work, and that the people who were good enough at it to get into a secret school would still be recognizably themselves: anxious, ambitious, self-destructive, human.
The Magicians is the kind of book that some readers love passionately and others find exhausting precisely because Quentin is hard to like. He is intelligent, self-aware about many things, and completely blind to others. His unhappiness is genuine but also sometimes self-indulgent, and the novel never lets him off the hook for that. Readers who find that combination compelling will likely find this one of the best fantasy novels of the decade. Readers who need protagonists to be sympathetic in conventional ways will find Quentin frustrating throughout.
The big ideas
- 1.
Magic school, if taken seriously, would be exhausting and technical, not charming. Brakebills works because Grossman refuses to romanticize the work of learning.
- 2.
Depression is not cured by getting what you want. Quentin's story is a sustained demonstration of this, and the novel is ruthless about it.
- 3.
Fillory as a childhood fantasy object is one of the most sophisticated treatments of what children's literature does to readers — the comfort and the prison of having loved a fictional world.
