The Magicians - Lev Grossman, 2009

People I admire and respect loved this adult fantasy. Me, not so much, though I wanted to. It sounded right up my alley: a cross between a sorcerer school story and realistic fiction. We meet Quentin Coldwater as a brainy seventeen-year-old Brooklynite. Led into a community garden which gets bigger as he walks through it, he finds himself in the grounds of Brakebill College for Magical Pedagogy somewhere up the Hudson. In this world magic takes talent but most of all ferocity at studying long hours and memorizing arcane scholarship--it's kind of like law school. Quentin's spent oodles of time practicing sleight-of-hand, which has prepared him well. That's a brilliant touch--great magicians in real life are the ones who've put in crazy time practicing, so it fits. The professors and the other students are well-drawn and believable modern people. I liked the idea of the Disciplines (herbalism, physical magic, etc.) grouping the students into little clubs, and that the initiation rite is for the "sorted" students to figure their way into the clubhouse.

So the book has redeeming qualities--many, in fact. I can see why others have liked it. But I have two major problems with it, which in combination ruined the experience for me.

1. Ultimately what makes the novel realistic/modern/"psychologically piercing" as the jacket says--it goes on "...in which good and evil aren't black and white, love and sex aren't simple and innocent, and power comes at a terrible price"--is almost entirely that the characters are miserable, drink a lot, swear, and treat each other badly. Quentin in particular is one of those people who mopes around, always expecting that the next goal (getting into Brakebills, having a girlfriend, entering Fillory (the world from their children's fantasy books which turns out to really exists)) will make him happy, and always bitterly disappointed that it doesn't. A major character, Eliot, is described as an alcoholic, but Quentin commits a terrible betrayal while drunk and doesn't acknowledge that as a problem. Plus this existential malaise they all share is far more told than shown. I was heartily sick of the lot of them halfway through.

2. Quoting the jacket flap again: "Grossman pays homage to the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, and J.K. Rowling while creating an utterly original realm..." If only it were so.

2a. OK, he's pretty open about the Rowling references--the characters frequently refer to Harry Potter, and given the contemporary setting we start in, it all makes sense. But does Brakebills have to be quite so slavishly Anglophilic, especially in upstate NY? Do we have to have a magic game (not Quidditch, but indebted to wizard chess) with an international tournament between magic schools? And for goodness' sake, the inconsistent number of students at Hogwarts has always been a problem in Rowling, but at least she can't be pinned down. Grossman specifically states the size of the maximum student body (100) and then, like Rowling, has many scenes and situations that just don't work if there are that few of them. Ultimately it feels a little lazy to model the Harry Potter world so closely.

2b. The major T.H. White reference I noticed is a doozy: as part of their education, the students live as animals, specifically geese. Merlin has the Wart inhabit many animal societies, and one of them is geese, including migration and courtship. Couldn't Grossman have picked something of his own? Again, lazy--very lazy. (Plus where they end up is basically the Isolate Tower from LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.)

2c. But the Narnia rip-off is totally brazen. In the book, everyone has read these Fillory and Further books by Chistopher Plover, about the five Chatwin children who enter the magical land of Fillory, the first time through the cabinet of a grandfather clock. The older children can't return in the later books, etc. etc. It's Narnia with just a few details changed. The final straw for me was when the characters enter Fillory themselves and recapitulate The Magician's Nephew. They hold buttons, rise through a fountain, and find themselves in one of countless squares, each fountain the gateway to a different world. To me, stealing the concept of the Wood Between the Worlds is inexcusable--and that's just the worst of many, many direct lifts from Lewis. Once in Fillory, our mopey crew travel to an underground tomb (aka Aslan's How) where the god of that world, a giant golden ram (!) waits to crown two kings and two queens, yada yada.

There's a decent twist at the end where the Big Bad turns out to be somebody rather unexpected, but I no longer cared about any of it. I felt like Grossman had plagiarized C.S. Lewis only to sully good fantasy with exchanges like this one:

"What the fuck, man! Didn't you plan for this?"
"This is the plan, Earth child," Dint snarled back. "You don't like it, go home. We need kings and queens in Fillory. Is that not a thing worth dying for?"
Not really, Quentin thought. Asshole. That slutty nymph was right.

I immediately went back to read the Narnia books again and get the taste of this out of my mind. All seven put together are about half the word count of The Magicians and at least an order of magnitude better, IMO.

U is for Undertow - Sue Grafton, 2009

Does Grafton have a contractual obligation to turn in a certain number of pages? This is a really good 250 pager bloated to 403, and all the extraneous stuff is front-loaded. I was on the verge of bailing early on, and almost the only thing that kept me going was the entertainment value of the excessive, prosaic details. I started reading passages aloud to Jonathan, like this series from one trivial backstory scene (all on pages 60 & 61):

Annabelle shrugged and chose a roll from the basket. She pulled off one segment and buttered it. She took a bite and tucked the nugget of bread into one side of her cheek, a move that slightly muffled her speech.
...
There was a pause while they studied their menus and decided what to have. Salads, rare New York strips, and baked potatoes with sour cream, green onion, and grated cheese.
...
He paused, looking up, as the waitress arrived at the table with the wine. She turned the bottle so Kip could read the label, and once he approved, she proceeded to open it. Kip sampled it, nodded, and said, "Very nice."

A little later Kinsey goes to interview someone who lives in a small town.

I retrieved my Mustang, gassed up at the entrance to the 101, and headed down the coast to Peephole (population 400). The area, like so much of California, was part of a Spanish land grant, deeded to Amador Santiago Delgado in 1831. His mother was distantly related to Maria Christina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, the fourth wife of King Ferdinand VII...

It goes on like that for two entire pages. Is this tourist brochure in any way relevant to the plot? No! It's as though the protagonists took down the gun on the wall in the first act, examined it, discussed the model, its provenance, and how to fire it, and then we never saw it again.

As I mentioned while discussing R is for Ricochet (I read S and T but didn't blog them & barely remember them), Grafton's alphabet mysteries are gradually turning into historicals. One could argue that she's dwelling on the details to document the 80s, or to show off her research (a common historical fiction failing)...or for the benefit of people from another culture? Jonathan wondered whether she'd hired someone to pad out the beginning of this book to meet the hypothesized page quota, but it reads exactly like Grafton's distinctive voice, taken to an extreme or parodied. She's always excelled at the immersive first-person experience, so that we know far more about Kinsey's daily life than about most other mystery protagonists.

But Grafton here crosses the line between documenting every detail in an interesting way--like Nicholson Baker in The Mezzanine--and walking the soporific reader through every minute of every day, diluting the telling moments with tedium.

Then on page 123 Walker McNally, one of the many people we've met so far, wakes up in a hospital with no memory of his drunken weekend and is told he killed a girl with his car. Like a python emerging from a swamp, the compelling, plot-weaving Grafton lifted me right out of the slog of the first quarter of the book, wrapped me in her coils and didn't let go again until the very satisfactory ending.

In other words, hang in there or skim until you get to the good stuff. Where are the editors of yore? Couldn't someone have carved away the flab and helped this become the taut little joyride it ought to be?

Claimed - Francis Stevens, 1920

I just stumbled across Stevens a few weeks ago while reading up on A. Merritt, one of my favorite pulp writers (years ago I purchased the rare Seven Steps to Satan for a Norwegian friend, read it before sending to him, and had to get my own copy). Merritt is said to have been influenced by both Lovecraft (I like, but a little goes a long way) and this Stevens, who as it turns out was Gertrude Barrows Bennett, US fantasy pioneer who essentially created "dark fantasy." This is one of her most well-known works, and after reading this I'll look out for more. A mysterious blue-green box, inscribed with characters in an unknown tongue which always flow back to the bottom no matter which way the box is turned, passes from hand to hand and brings a curse with it. J. J. Robinson, tenacious man of business (Uncle Jesse to the inevitable love interest, Leilah), won't give up the box, though the sea itself comes to claim it. Dr. John Vanaman is the protagonist who traces the box's origins and protects Leilah and Uncle Jesse to the best of his ability. The pace and tension pick up when they leave land. The Nagaina, a stout sea-going vessel, chases the spectral Red Dolphin across the ocean to a lost blood-red city... It's great classic pulp, very atmospheric and eerie even when it doesn't entirely make sense.

In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim - Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1899

I'd seen this referenced on many FHB title pages (in the "author of" list), but knew nothing about it--I would have guessed it was one of her few European historicals like A Lady of Quality, and would have been wrong. It's actually set in the U.S., and the title refers to a claim for damages from the Civil War. The protagonists have to move from North Carolina to D.C. for almost a year to pursue the claim with the government, and the depiction of the city back then is fascinating--Dupont Circle is referred to as a residential backwater--but that's not the core of the book. It's primarily about lazy, carefree Big Tom, postmaster and general store keeper in a tiny town, and the changes he undergoes after adopting an orphaned infant girl. Her mysterious origins are eventually revealed along with Tom's, and everything resolves very satisfactorily. It's one of Burnett's sprawling, ambitious works, bringing together many plot threads and third-person perspectives, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The subplot about two out-of-wedlock pregnancies isn't at all psychologically believable, but Burnett's liberal-for-her-times views are interesting.

Vagabondia - Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1884

Plowing through new-to-me FHB paid off with this book, which I stayed up late reading, crying through the last few chapters. Why was this a successful tear-jerker when the other heroines dying for love left me cold? Because Dolly and Grif, the star-crossed lovers, are so believably specific, people with strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. The misunderstandings that separate them are neither ridiculously trivial nor engineered by a villain. None of the other characters--the foolish sister, the rich suitor, snooty Lady Augusta--are cardboard. The cultural camps of Philistines and Bohemians are distinct but neither all-good nor all-bad. A new favorite.

Frances Hodgson Burnett kick - minor works

Now that Project Gutenberg offers epub format, and the Sony Reader is switching over to it, I'm downloading stuff like crazy. One click from Google Books, too! I have both a PRS-505 (thanks, Boyce!), which I'm using now, and a PRS-500, which is off at the Sony factory being updated to use epub (500 owners, don't miss your chance!).

My first catch-up has been Frances Hodgson Burnett, one of my favorite authors. I picked up everything in PG and Google Books, finding some stories, novels, and novellas I've never read. Here are some not-very-good ones:

The White People - 1920. Burnett did write some great stuff late in life (Robin, one of my favorites, is 1922), but this is almost dreck. A little girl sees ghosts but doesn't know that's what they are until she grows up. Burnett's indulging her woo-woo leanings but not providing any compensating character development. I can read T. Tembarom every year but I'd never pick this up again.

Theo: A Sprightly Love Story - 1877. Not close to dreck but not good either, from the other end of her career (yet I loved 1873's Vagabondia, which I'll cover in a separate post). A poor girl is brought to London by a wealthy aunt, falls in love with a man who's engaged to be married, pines away until everyone is noble & self-sacrificing. Burnett sure knows how to work the cliched situations, but at least these characters have a little more dimension.

Lodusky - 1877. Burnett's narrative bag o' tricks includes having two protagonists, an unreflective "uncouth" character (rural or blue collar/spontaneous and natural) and a sophisticated observer (citified and cultured/buttoned up and inhibited). Here there are three: the title character, a backwoods siren; a middle-aged female writer; and the writer's love interest, an artist who's fatally fascinated by the beautiful-but-evil temptress. Crossing class lines never works out in FHB stories. Lots of bad southern dialect, although not as incomprehensible as some 19th-century attempts can be.

In the Closed Room - 1904. Another mystical the-afterlife-is-wonderful story with a live child playing with a ghost child, but more fleshed out than The White People. Like that one, it's full of italics (late Burnett lurvs italics) which the early PG texts unfortunately rendered in CAPS, which leaves a very WEIRD impression.

Esmeralda - 1877. This time it's a sophisticated couple (French, teacher and artist) who are observers of an uncouth American couple: "Esmeraldy" and Wash, North Carolinians separated by E's social climbing nouveau-riche mother. Mother has her heart set on a "Markis" for her daughter. Double pining--Wash follows the family to Paris and almost dies of starvation before the French couple operate the mechane.


"Le Monsieur de la Petite Dame" - 1877. A noble husband tries to sacrifice himself for his young American wife, pining for another. Set in Pari, sprinkled with "Pouf!" and "Mon Dieu!" in lieu of dialect.

The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment - A.J. Jacobs, 2009

Jacobs' books are catnip for me, and Guinea Pig Diaries is the funniest yet - a cross between Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Barry. Instead of focusing on a year-long project, as The Know-it-All and The Year of Living Biblically did, this one collects nine shorter stunts. Some (outsourcing all his activities) are inherently more promising than others (posing for a nude photo), but AJ milks them all for maximum laughs, interspersed with personal insights. But what completely blew my mind was discovering that his outsourcing experience, which first appeared as an article in Esquire (9/05), is what inspired legendary asshole Tim Ferris to write The 4-Hour Workweek, whose siren song (not unlike Amway) drew millions of gullible buyers. (It's "been sold into 35 languages!") You can't blame Jacobs, whose humane and fundamentally sensible outlook underpins everything he writes. Don't miss the priceless book trailer.