The Brakebills students are freakishly intelligent and the school excitingly rigorous.
How should they refer to nonmagical people, they wonder: Civilians? Muggles? Mundanes? They are familiar to the point of self-consciousness, as are so many millennials, with the works of J. His characters are steeped in stories like “The Lord of the Rings” and its many near and distant relatives. Grossman, who has declared his fondness for “sparring with other books” in his writing. I am the sort of adult who goes around reading “Harry Potter.” And so, too, is Mr. Wood told Vanity Fair, “is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading ‘Harry Potter.’ ” “The rapture with which this novel has been received,” Mr. Even Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Goldfinch” has been drawn in, pronounced by the critic James Wood to be too childishly and smoothly entertaining - more Krispy Kreme, perhaps, than mille-feuille. The issue, roughly, is if it is possible to be a serious citizen and still admire purportedly nonserious books: young adult novels, fantasy, genre fiction, books with compulsively interesting plots. Out here in the real world, the yearning of some readers to experience that same heady feeling has lately been the subject of a spicy literary debate over what reading is for, pleasure or intellectual enrichment, and whether this should be a binary question at all. “This is how you felt when you were 8 years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once.”
“This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,” Julia explains, pointing out a delicate little shrub struggling for life. The garden is in Fillory, the Narnia-like world that appeared in a series of books that they loved as children and that, thrillingly, turned out actually to exist. Toward the end of “The Magician’s Land,” the final volume of Lev Grossman’s wonderful trilogy for grown-ups, Julia and Quentin, both 30-ish, visit a magic garden whose plants are expressions of human emotions.
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