Omni Podcast: Lev Grossman on "The Magicians"

It is, in some ways, the high-concept book of the summer. Lev Grossman's third novel, The Magicians, was described to me as "Harry Potter for grownups," and in the reading it turned out to be exactly that. In publishing and bookselling, we are, to a fault, always looking for that perfect hook that will make a book seem both familiar and fresh, safe and exciting, and there's hardly a phrase that could do that more efficiently than the simple "It's Harry Potter for grownups!" I've been using it too when I tell people about the book (it's so easy and delicious to say you can hardly help it), but I then say, "No, really...," and have to explain further, which I guess makes it not so efficient after all. What I usually go on to say is something like, "It's literally Harry Potter for grownups. It takes the premises, the setting, the magic, of Harry Potter (and Narnia and A Wizard of Earthsea and...), and imagines a story in which the sex, ennui, alcohol, and anti-climaxes of early adulthood exist right alongside the magic. And, in a simple but brilliant stroke, its budding magicians have, just like us, already read all those books, and they come to their unexpected apprenticeships with a host of expectations about what magic worlds are like. After all, as Grossman points out in our interview below, Harry Potter, based on what we know about him, would definitely have been a Harry Potter fan. (I should just note that the PW review we have up on our page for the book completely misses the point in this regard--of course it's "derivative.")

I expect that we'll be hearing a lot about this book when it comes out next month, but for now, the best place to get into the spirit of it are the sites that someone (Grossman? his publisher?) has created for some of the elements of the book: the magic school, Brakebills; the children's book series, Fillory and Further, that Grossman's young magicians have all grown up on; and the putative author of that series, Christopher Plover, all spot-on pastiches. I'm on record as being a giant fan of fake books (and their fake covers), so I ate up the Plover and Fillory pages with almost the same pleasure with which I devoured the book.

You can listen to our BookExpo interview with Grossman below, in which we discuss matters Fillory and Potter, as well as how to go about writing an American version of a British genre and what he sees from his perch as Time's book critic and nerd blogger. (Great line from today's ComicCon reporting: "This isn't nerd Woodstock, it's nerd Altamont.") You can also read it after the jump.

Amazon.com: I'm just going to start with the elephant in the room. This has been pitched to me--and I think, very correctly--as "Harry Potter for grownups." In the book, there's a mention of Quidditch, Harry Potter is part of that universe that they live in. Was it in the background or the foreground for you as you wrote the book?

Lev Grossman: Well, that's the elephant in the room. I thought something really awful was going to come out!

It wasn't, initially. I began working on the book a shockingly long time ago, in 1996, at which time the elephant in the room was Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, because that was the novel about a young wizard going to a school for wizards, and learning about his powers. I set aside the book, and then I came back to it in 2004, at which point Harry Potter was the elephant. But again, there are references to Harry in the book, and in a way, they're supposed to tip the reader off that, of course, this isn't an imitation of Harry Potter. Rather, it's working with that story.

In a way, it's treating it as one of these epic stories that are part of our culture, and I think will now be retold any number of times, in any number of different ways, like The Odyssey, or something like that, or the story of Hamlet. It becomes a story that's part of our culture, and we play with it, and come at in different ways, and squeeze different meanings out of it. I guess that's what I was trying to do: squeeze Harry Potter.

Amazon.com: Well, that's one thing I really like about the book. There's that Harold Bloom book, The Anxiety of Influence. This book seems not anxious at all about its influences. You seem very comfortable writing within all these stories that have been told the same way, where young people go through a door, go through a garden, go through somewhere to enter a magical world. You and the characters are very aware that all those stories are out there.

Grossman: Well, this is my culture, and for a lot of people, our culture. I grew up reading and rereading obsessively C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, T.H. White, the Oz books--of which there are a horrifying number--Phantom Tollbooth. These stories about a young person who crosses into a world that isn't our own, they're so profoundly a part of who I am, and who I think we are. I wanted to write about it. It's the culture in which I am steeped, and I wanted to write about it, and find out more about what it means and what it meant to me.

When I started writing The Magicians, it was like nothing else I'd ever written or experienced. I wrote the first quarter of it in a week. I mean, it just came pouring out of me, and I realized that I'd been waiting to write it my whole life.

Amazon.com: It feels like that's the way the young people in the story are as well, especially Quentin, the main character. He has a series of books, which I think are wonderfully evoked throughout the book, about a land called Fillory. He has them in the back and the front of his mind when he starts off on his adventure.

Grossman: One of my favorite things about my own book [laughter]--one of the ideas that I wanted to play with was the idea that I felt if someone grew up the way Harry Potter did, in a cupboard under stairs in an abusive family--one thing about Harry Potter that Rowling chose, I think, not to explore was that Harry Potter would be a huge Harry Potter fan. He would grow up totally geeked out on fantasy and anything else that would give him a feeling of escape. Quentin grows up the same way. He reads obsessively, and when he finally gets his wish--or what he thinks his wish is--everything that happens to him after that he sees through the lens of what he's already read. He knows what a school for magic is supposed to be like, and when it's not like what he thinks it's going to be like, he's always comparing that experience to what he's read. Sometimes it's disappointing and sometimes it's liberating when things don't work out the way he's been told they're going to work out.

Amazon.com: I think a lot of these models that we've had as readers all along have been very British--the kind of boarding school Harry Potter tradition. And one thing I liked about this story is that it plays with that story, that tradition, but it seems to me a very American version of that story. Was that something you were conscious of?

Grossman: It was something I wanted to do. The modern fantasy tradition comes from England. It didn't come from America. We didn't think of it. They did. I wanted to see what would happen if you wrested it away from its native land, and really brought it over here. Really brought it over here, and have people talk like Americans, think like Americans, get drunk on beer like Americans, do things the way Americans do. What would happen if an American were put into a story, a very English story like the one in The Magicians? It wouldn't work the same way just because we are different.

It gets back a little bit to LeGuin, who in the '60s was an American who took that story and made it somehow more American. She invented her own world where it took place. But this idea of taking that story, a very English story, and seeing how it plays in America with Americans--that was part of the fun of the book.

Amazon.com: Well, we've been talking pretty generally about the book and the tradition. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about Quentin and his friends, and about Brakebills, the school he finds himself transported to--

Grossman: Quentin, when we first meet him, is a senior in high school, and he's very unhappy, and he's very clever in the way that one is clever in school, and gets good test scores and things like that. He's very stupid in other ways. He doesn't understand himself very well. He's very emotionally, sort of--he's got a lot of growing up to do. Early on in the book, he discovers that magic is real, and he's invited to study it at a secret college for magic. The story becomes a lot about Quentin growing up, and discovering the power that comes from being an adult, and also the terrible costs that come with that as well, the things you have to give up when you become an adult.

In different ways, all of his friends--he makes this tight little circle of friends that he makes when he's at college, and they all are going through that process, I think in very different ways, and in some cases, very reluctantly.

Amazon.com: People who become trained as magicians, they basically don't have to work after that point. They have this immense power, but it seems on one hand that power has the potential to corrupt, but especially with these kids, it seems to have the power just to bore.

Grossman: One of the things that makes The Magicians somewhat unusual as a fantasy novel, is that there isn't a big bad. If you imagine Harry Potter, but subtract Voldemort from the equation, what happens? Fantasy novels are often organized around a very clear demarcation of good and evil. Say what you like about Voldemort. When he's around, you sort of know who you are, because you know where you stand with respect to him. In The Magicians, there isn't a kind of powerful adversary who's there for people to fight. As a result, the story becomes--it's still an adventure, and still a struggle, but it's a very different kind of adventure. It's more an adventure of people who have to figure out who they are. They have an immense amount of power, but, well, when you have magic, and you don't have Voldemort, you have to figure out what magic is for, and the answer is surprisingly not very obvious.

Amazon.com: Yeah. These kids, before they entered Brakebills, they seemed very future-focused. They weren't sure what they wanted to do, but Quentin is off for his Princeton interview; they're at this magnet school for brainiac kids. But I was struck, at the school, and even after, there's very little sense of what the adult world is like. What do you do as a grownup magician?

Grossman: Well, it's something that I don't want to talk too much about, because it's part of the reveal of the book. It's a lot harder to find meaning, I think, and to find a purpose, and figure out what your quest is, what your adventure is. It's not handed to these characters the way it is in some books. It's an idea that I wanted to play with. They have to work a bit harder to figure out where they're supposed to go, and what they're supposed to do, because the way isn't laid out for them.

Amazon.com: I wanted to ask you about your other hat, as the book critic for Time. One thing I noticed, I have some wonderful writers coming in to talk today: you, then China Mieville, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Kostova, people who are all working with fantastical elements in fiction that's still pretty much in the mainstream, defined pretty broadly. I remember when you made your top 100 novels of the century [since 1923, actually], I think you managed to sneak in Watchmen and Ubik in there. Do you sense that the mainstream is shifting in fiction?

Grossman: Not shifting exactly, but some kind of barrier, membrane--that sounds a bit gross--is rupturing. Something was keeping, culturally, fantasy and science fiction apart from the mainstream. Those two parts of literature, they couldn't really talk to each other. What those writers you named, and some other writers, are doing, they're just shattering that barrier, and all kinds of really exciting weird hybrid books are coming into being that nobody really saw coming. It's, I think, absolutely the most exciting thing that's going on in fiction right now.

When I started The Magicians, I had just read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. When I read that book, I realized that something was up. These two worlds were colliding with this incredible, just exciting heat and energy. I realized I had to be part of it, and that's one reason I wrote The Magicians.

Amazon.com: And, speaking of yet another hat you wear as a tech journalist for Time, what do you think about the different ways of storytelling that are out there these days? The fact that maybe video games, or just the web has on the way that we think of story, and the way that we think of influence. I think some of those writers are also very comfortable with--Lethem is very well known for being open to influence, to almost plagiarism--he wrote that great essay in Harper's--and you seem quite open to influence in that way too.

Grossman: It seems to be the way people are working right now. This culture of mashing things up, and sampling them, parodying them, playing with them, taking other people's stories. That's always going on in culture. For some reason, it seems to be the kind of work that artists are doing right now. It has to do with taking things that are out there, and repurposing them, and just inverting them, and doing other, even more perverse things to them. There seems to be this huge need to do that, and I certainly need to do it, and I don't quite know why, but it's very fun to watch it happen.

--Tom