By Sam Reader
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a 2009 fantasy novel with lots to say about maturity. The novel’s examination and deconstruction of the “magic school” and “portal fantasy” subgenres casts its main characters as aimless self-indulgent fantasy junkies desperate to fill a hole in their lives with magic, but their immature attachment to fantastical children’s fiction eventually dooms them to trauma. While Grossman outlines these forces, he does so while completely ignoring the ruinous effects of privilege on their psychological makeup and on the lives of those “below” them. With The Magicians, Grossman created a cynical fable that talks around ruinous power dynamics as a problem of maturity and believing in something too much, adopting an empty centrist stance that “people just need to grow up” as opposed to actually engaging in the dynamics of vast economic and cultural privilege underpinning the premise of the book.
Our protagonist is seventeen year old Quentin Coldwater, a chronically depressed and apathetic fantasist who has spent most of his life disconnected from the world. Though not a disaffected young man in the right-winger mold, it’s clear he’s completely out of touch with reality. His intellect, massaged by years in the upper levels of the elite New York City private school system, pushes him into a social group of advanced-placement kids. His parents are apathetic professionals, uninterested in their child’s mental well being, who make just enough money to live comfortably in Brooklyn (or, depending on your viewpoint, just little enough money to feel like their social strata isn’t partially responsible for the world’s problems).
In essence, Quentin is your average ivory-tower upper middle class teenage intellectual found in any area that votes Democrat – intelligent enough not to believe in anything damaging, but so insulated by his privilege and intense studies that he doesn’t actually have to believe in anything real. The kind of person who knows what he should do but has absolutely no conception of what to do or the costs of doing it. In other words, not actively awful, but still incredibly dangerous.
For all Grossman wants to condemn Quentin for being out of touch with reality and not believing in anything, he also doesn’t do much to color in Quentin’s life before the story kicks off, with the only diversion from monotonous test prep and study sessions being his fascination and obsession with a set of fantasy novels set in the magical land of Fillory, and sleight-of-hand magic. He is all the privilege, and none of the substance, not unlike his fellow main cast. One can almost imagine that he’d live a life of yelling at strangers he doesn’t like on social media and trying to catch them out as right-wingers while pretending to do his grotesquely overpaid job. The kind of guy who thinks he’s being conscientious when starting a layoff meeting with a land acknowledgement and saying people can bring their heckin’ doggos while they empty out their desks.
It is only the justification of his privilege and ideas that drives him forward in any significant way—when Quentin is accepted into Brakebills Academy, something between a magic prep school and a grad school and is thus given access to both a fantasy world and something that caters directly to his interests, he comes alive in a very minimal way. Forcing Quentin to interact with others forces him to have a personality, and while he’s still essentially shuffled from place to place and rewarded for his privilege, he stops fading into the background. He’s forced to engage in the world the way many supposedly “right thinking” privileged people are—by interacting with the “safe” kind of marginalized people with whom he shares some commonality.
Grossman calls attention to this (though I’m not sure if it’s on purpose) by having the entire campus in a time bubble out of step with the “real world” (to the point that winter break takes place in the middle of spring). The holiday sections (which are about as empty and lifeless as everything Grossman creates) even confirm this, juxtaposing Quentin’s oddly detached school life against the dull, mundane, and unenlightened drudgery of the world he left. It’s meant to show him growing up and leaving the world he knew behind, complete with former friends either burning out or moving away, but instead it exactly mirrors the kind of privileged “enlightenment journey” that many real-life Quentins (of all genders) undertake, where a change of environment suddenly turns them into the philosopher-kings of the world backed up by their privilege and disdain for those they left behind.
Which leads us to the titular Magicians, Quentin’s various school friends. Penny, Eliot, Alice, Janet, and Josh are privileged, but just on the right side of it. Barring Eliot (who quickly divorces himself from his tortured roots as a farm boy from Oregon and is privileged by his natural talent for magic), the main cast comes from exceptionally privileged backgrounds that afford them a lot of opportunity—Quentin’s access to a higher level of education means his future is secure and his family is affluent enough to move to Connecticut, Alice is the daughter of affluent magicians who change their house once a month out of boredom, and Penny’s punk aesthetic coupled with his desire to be a “lone desperado of magic” speak to someone who took their rebellious phase further than it ever needed to. He’s even described later as an “overgrown suburban gangsta” when he rejoins the group.
This is compounded by the very thing that got them into Brakebills, a school based on English public schools (bastions of calcifying old order and privilege that they are), that they all had “something special” about them. The titular Magicians are (unlike their more sympathetic and telegenic TV counterparts) hollow, ugly people all desperate to resolve their trauma and emptiness by waving their hands and manipulating higher laws of reality, not dissimilar to how the ultra-wealthy attempt to do so in modern-day America. But this backgrounding of privilege is left mostly unexplored. Their interpersonal relationships, their desire to invade Fillory, even the way they excel beyond the mostly faceless Brakebills students around them is built on a platform of this privilege.
Grossman seems to view the hand-waving itself as the core issue instead. The protagonists learn the rigorous rituals of magic and advance through years of schooling. As they rise through the ranks and learn various disciplines at Brakebills, sinister elements and hints of a greater world arise in the shadows, eventually pushing the titular Magicians to explore the land of Fillory and confront an eldritch horror threatening both worlds and indeed the whole of existence itself. Fillory in Grossman’s world is a place of immaturity, where children fall asleep on the back of a gigantic stuffed horse and mice run a pirate ship, contrasted with the Fillory they visit as adults, no less immature but much more adult after years of manipulation at the hands of an antagonist initially known as the Beast. While Grossman’s ideas of magic and maturity eventually lead to a doomed showdown where a group of developmentally stunted twentysomething grad-student magicians are pitted against a formerly human abomination whose unholy union between trauma and an inability to mature turn him into the Beast, it’s the point Grossman raises but leaves unexamined that are more curious and intriguing.
Grossman explores the “something missing” that drives them to meddle in things they don’t understand, but frames it as empty immature self-indulgence and suffering from a lack of purpose. The unsaid part is that while aimlessness affects everyone when they’re eventually spat out into the world inadequately prepared, and a lack of purpose and wholeness affects most people with significant enough mental or physical trauma, privilege and opportunity inform the survivability of those things. The school even sets them up with a bottomless trust fund so they can make it out into the world after four to five years of education as magic nerds, giving their subsequent hedonism an institutional and financial backing unmatched. By placing himself above his protagonists and being blind to their obvious privilege, Grossman’s repeated rebukes of the fantastical throughout the novel ring hollow, blaming “fantasy” and for the more insidious nature of the privileged to (however well-meaning or no) play God to those supposedly “beneath” them on their own internal rankings chart.
The unexamined privilege of the characters creates an atmosphere where Grossman spends a lot of time talking around the obvious central point. Quentin and his group of friends’ meddling in other worlds is presented as a self-interested way to fill the hole inside themselves (Quentin forces the group into their first journey to Fillory after he and Alice cheat on each other), but the untouched text is that these are privileged people meddling in the affairs of the less privileged to fill the hole inside themselves. Forcing others to be their eventual purpose, aid in their emotional labor, and assuage their personal guilt and trauma.
It’s this twisted view of the world that links them with The Beast himself, who is actually one of the original travelers to Fillory named Martin Chatwin. Neither side of the ultimate conflict really cares about Fillory, it’s a battle of privilege versus privilege, the twisted and traumatized Martin against a group of hyper privileged New Yorkers filling the hole within by playing at heroics before taking a sinecure and forgetting about the whole “saving the world” thing. Regardless of who wins, neither group is actually good for Fillory. The Magicians might be trying to help, but their selfish reasons and obvious privilege doom everyone around them. Their opposite number, The Beast, is a sexually traumatized manchild whose own immense privilege and inability to resolve his trauma causes him to play at being a dark elder god by drinking raw magic and bending a magical fairyland to his whims.
This is illustrated when Julia, formerly privileged but destroyed by an imperfect memory charm and the knowledge that she’s not at the top of the food chain, is both destitute and completely broken in her meeting with Quentin. She’s violently shoved out of the story until later, an object of pity because she falls below the threshold of visibility and privilege necessary to be a participant in the story. Without the privilege conferred to her by class and magical aptitude, unshielded from the possibilities of trauma, she doesn’t bounce back, she spirals.
While Grossman’s aim is to depict how two flawed groups, their brains poisoned by a lifetime of fantasy fiction, try to fight each other, it’s actually similar to another phenomenon, that of the powerful trying to process their emotional labor by “doing something” to help the less privileged, something that usually ends in doom. It also mirrors the near constant churn of online proxy wars where groups of privileged jerks use the internet and its constant games of telephone to get less privileged people to fight it out for their behalf. The empty combat only harms the proxy combatants, and indeed The Magicians doesn’t even really get into the politics and world of Fillory, because to the privileged characters of Grossman’s world, Fillory is beside the point. Even as their meddling causes harm and trauma to the main characters (who like many of the privileged suffer from “main character syndrome,” a condition adjacent to narcissism), the implications on the larger world remain mostly ignored. To Grossman and his characters, the nonprivileged don’t matter.
It’s even seen in their actions once they reach Fillory, assuming immediately that they’re the main characters of whatever’s going on because that’s what they do with everything—they’re the most interesting, the most powerful, the most attractive people they know, so why wouldn’t the world be made just for them? It allows The Beast to get the upper hand, but eventually the person who has the most impact is Jane Chatwin, a character who tends to stick to the background of everything (she’s a major character in the Fillory books, the time-bending Watcherwoman, and pops up from time to time to have cryptic conversations with Quentin), one who stays quiet and nudges the action from the edges of the story, refusing to get involved directly in the struggle because she’s supposedly matured and evolved past the Magicians and the Beast’s more petty concerns. Even then, her viewpoint is hardly more “evolved,” or “mature.” She’s still presented as “above” others, just in a different manner. In fact, the entire reason people trust the main characters is because they aren’t involved, which is somehow presented as better.
By leaving the obvious influence of privilege unexamined on The Magicians, Grossman cynically grounds his book in a kind of empty centrist indictment of “fantasy” and immaturity. “Good” and “Evil,” “cynicism” and “idealism,” all are depicted as immature extremes while eliding the obvious, rebelling against ideas informed by privilege in a way that indicts and frames a genre’s conventions as wrong while allowing the author and the larger issues of the work an (ineffective) out. How much influence maturity has on Grossman’s story and the destructive fates of its protagonists feels somewhat forced given that all of them are essentially wielding immense amounts of privilege over the lives and fates of others. With this inability to examine the central issue of his characters’ lives, The Magicians might end with its protagonists maturing, but Grossman and his writing never can.
