Grossman's Debut Novel Lacks the Magic

Warp - Lev Grossman

Once a reader has found a new author he or she truly enjoys, a typical next step is to visit that author’s older works.  Clearly, St. Martin’s Press figured that they had a gold mine in their vaults:

with the SyFy channel version of Lev Grossman’s "Magicians" series, they figured fans would be eager to (buy and) read Grossman’s earlier works.

If you’re inclined to do just that by snapping up a copy of his novel Warp, it’s not a good idea…

The aimless, slacker Gen-Xer bit has been done to death. Let’s face it: there are dozens, if not hundreds, of novels out there about the aimless types who’ve now been replaced in the literary world by their own aimless offspring. In the case of Warp, it’s Hollis Kessler, late a graduate of Boston College who – like so many LT¹ types before him – is determined to stay in the town where he had so much fun as an undergrad. Hollis’s problem is that he’s the slackest of his little coterie of slackers – even his ex-girlfriend has yuppified herself and now sashays about a glamorous office.

Hollis, on the other hand, spends most of his time drinking and smoking, except when he’s accidentally encountering a strange young woman named Alix… or is it Xanthe? Coaxed into action by a friend, Peters, he embarks on a typical slacker nihilistic quest. He and Peters sneak into the night hoping to break into a suburban McMansion and steal the keys to the family beach house. And that’s about the size of it. A short novel that Grossman toiled over for more than a decade, Warp bears glimmerings of the sort of talent that would win him myriad fans twenty years later. Unfortunately, it’s a boring novel about boring people, a novel made even worse by a stylistic tic Grossman adopted. Every page or two, the narrative is broken by a fragment of dialogue or narrative from what appears to be old "Star Trek" and "STTNG episodes." Not only is this disruptive, it’s also about the only way the book manages to be long enough to escape novella length.

Sadly, the stylistic trick lends nothing to the story, which is a dreary, nihilistic writing exercise that rightfully disappeared from the shelves twenty years ago. If you ask me, it should disappear again. Damn, and I was all prepared to like it because The Magicians (and the rest of the trilogy) was such fun.

¹ LT: someone who would give his Left Testicle to stay in the town where he went to college (metaphorically speaking, of course)