Sometimes you read a book and you go temporarily insane.
The first time I read this book, I’m pretty sure this happened to me. At the very least, I experienced some sort of existential crisis while trying to sort out my feelings for it. I definitely remember being so upset and flamboozled that I started crying while writing my review over on Goodreads. I still think this book could have maybe been executed a little bit differently to let the readers know that Grossman was with us on his characters being insufferable shitheads, but I also think this book hit a nerve in me that I wasn’t really able to articulate, and I got defensive and weird. Which happens. I swore I would never read the sequels.
And then . . . somehow I decided that I would? I no longer remember the thought processes that brought me to change my mind. Which is sort of weird? I had a seriously strong reaction to it! Maybe I’m just older. Maybe my brain has had the book in the back of my mind all this time and has been mulling it over, and then it decided without my permission that we were going to give it another go.
Whatever the reasoning all up in there, I’m SO GLAD THAT I DID.
I’m writing this review after having already finished the trilogy, which in my opinion got better with each book. I am now of the very strong opinion that this book absolutely cannot be read on its own. If you’re going to try this series, you have to do all of it, otherwise you’re missing the whole picture. This book isn’t fully itself without knowing how things end for Quentin and his friends. Maybe that’s a weakness in Grossman’s writing style, but it is a fact.
Everyone I know who’s read this series agrees that its main character Quentin is a douchecanoe of the highest order. He’s intelligent and hard working, but he’s also privileged, whiny, and self-pitying. He’s prone to long bouts of feeling sorry for himself and thinking the world is shit, which leads to all sorts of unpleasant behaviors and choices, including drug use, alcohol abuse, philandering, general wastrel-type behavior, teenage malaise, and behavior that indicates he feels he’s better than nearly everyone else. And all this while there is MAGIC in the world.
People have called this the grown up Harry Potter. But I call bullshit on that. Sure, they go to magic school, but all of the themes and character development in this book aren’t aimed at undercutting or responding to anything going on in that series on more than a superficial level. The book itself tells you what it’s really concerned with right in the first chapter (and it’s borne out by the following books), and that’s the magical land of Fillory, which is Grossman’s answer to The Chronicles of Narnia. Fillory for Grossman and for Quentin represents the hope of childhood, that there exists a magical place or state of being where anything is possible, where heroes always win and you’re handed glory on a silver platter, just because you deserve it. It’s the main goal of these books to subvert both Quentin’s black despair about the state of the adult world, and his naïve belief that the answer to feeling better about life will come from outside himself, from a magical land where he can be King and all his problems will disappear.
This book is very adult. I really don’t think it does a great job on its own of letting you know the true aim of the series as a whole. It’s just as likely to completely turn readers off as it is to excite them. But Grossman picked the style of remaining close inside his characters’ heads for a reason, and while it is unpleasant to be that close to them in this first outing (and large portions of the next one), I think a more omniscient narrator in the end would have been the worse choice. Sure, that hypothetical narrator could have let us in on the secret that the series would be about Quentin growing up and out of his awfulness, but I don’t think that second or third book would have been nearly so powerful a reading experience if it had.
Long story short, if you gave up on this series like I did, maybe consider giving it another go?
