It's not so much an external world that's being observed, but the character's internal world that's being projected around them. And on the other hand, there were the fantasists, who are not that interested in the intricacies and moment-to-moment psychological experience of their characters and who place them in an imagined, idealized world. There were these writers who anatomized the world around them and had characters with very rich inner lives. So you had this funny schism in the first few decades of the 20th century. I loved what they wrote, studied it and was very moved by it.Īt the same time the modernists were doing that, the fantasists - Lewis, Tolkien, T.H. When I was an academic for three unsuccessful years, I was really interested in the modernists, the way they very minutely described and itemized this shattered, commodified, disenchanted world we live in. I'm afraid this may sound kind of glib, but the guiding principle that I use to generate more Magicians prose is to be very tightly focused on how people would actually experience it. In a way, you're reminding people of the world they're trying to escape by reading about castles. That's as huge a violation of the conventions of the genre as anything else you do. There's a metaphor I underlined near the end of "The Magician's Land," where someone is looking at the Castle Whitespire, all lit up before an impending battle, and compares it to a Manhattan high-rise filled with high-powered attorneys pulling an all-nighter. But you've brought to this stuff a voice that is sophisticated, contemporary, adult, like the voice of, say, a Jonathan Franzen novel. To my mind, the most innovative aspect of the Magicians trilogy is that you have this particular type of fictional material - Fillory, a school for wizards - that's typically written about in an earnest, somewhat naive voice, which makes sense given that the books that inspired you were for kids. So it is possible to write a critique and a loving homage at the same time in one work and that's what I was trying to do. One of the primal reading experiences of my life was "Watchmen" by Alan Moore, which was this utterly scathing demolition of the superhero story and all the conventions it stood on - and at the same time the greatest superhero story that had ever been written.
You love your parents, but they're absolutely maddening and you despise them. It really is like having a conversation with your parents. I love it and I always will, but I have to tell you there are some gaps here and I'm going to try to fill them in." I felt like I needed to say, "It's wonderful what you did. And really nothing useful in there at all about sex. There was nothing in there about quarterly estimated taxes and midlife depression. Lewis how poorly I'd been prepared for some of the challenges of early middle age by my obsessive childhood rereading of the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis and trying to tell them about how my life was different from the lives of their characters. In a weird way I really felt that I was talking to J.K. I believe Harold Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence" theory about authors needing to define themselves through rebelling against a forerunner. I thought of it as having a conversation. The Magicians trilogy takes two bodies of source material in children's literature - the Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter books - and transfigures them by moving them into adult fiction, with an adult perspective on the world.
I recently spoke with Grossman about breaking the rules of the fantasy genre and the similarities between magic, writing code and clinical depression. The Magicians trilogy has won a sizable and devoted readership, and a pilot based on the first book is currently in production for the SyFy channel. Would it be too realistic for fantasy readers and too fantastical for fans of realism? Grossman, a book critic for Time magazine, describes himself as "risk-averse," but he gambled, and it paid off. Although it told the story of a young man, Quentin Coldwater, whisked from anomie in contemporary Brooklyn to a secret wizardry university in upstate New York, the novel was written in the sort of wised-up, self-conscious tone literary writers use to convey stories of tottering marriages and waylaid careers. But when Grossman published the first book, "The Magicians," in 2009, he felt some trepidation. 1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller list this week, following on more than one enthusiastic review. The final novel in Lev Grossman's bestselling, genre-bending trilogy, "The Magician's Land," landed in the No.