ebaths | Magic by William Goldman (Reply)

William Goldman is the author and screenwriter of a lot of well-known novels and films, probably most well known today being The Princess Bride (he also wrote Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among others). I read The Princess Bride years ago and really enjoyed it. Since then, Magic has kind of been my white whale—it seemed interesting so I wanted to read it, but it’s hard to find a copy and it’s well out of print.

Well, I finally got a copy from the library (a first edition from 1976!) and I finished it…

I liken this book to a really charismatic but poor singer at a karaoke bar. The song as a whole is nothing great, and you wouldn’t want to have it on CD, but the person up there is has so much charisma and charm that you enjoy it anyway. Magic is weird, pacing is all over the place, and it doesn’t build to anything satisfying. All the same, the prose is charming and scene-to-scene the book keeps you interested, so I still enjoyed it.

Magic is a psychological thriller (!!) about “a man obsessed by magic and the dark forces at work to destroy him” (from the book jacket). It’s very “funny”, not super serious as you might think from that description. The story is about a magician named Corky. Goldman’s prose is really magnetic and it pulls you in right away, plus it leans heavily on obfuscation in the first fifth or so to keep the reader in the dark. The middle portion is a backstory to Corky’s life, his childhood, how he “ended up like this” kind of.

The last fifth of the book really gave me The Talented Mr. Ripley vibes and I loved it. This is one of those books where the ending lifts up the rest of the book—in this case, just because it was well-done and it eliminated the feeling of boredom that I had developed up until then. The book is not very well paced and it feels like it relies on tension that’s not really there.

Despite that, the characters were good, and each scene alone is interesting, enough that I think I’ll remember this one beyond what it deserves via the plot/overall quality.

Also, this book was also turned into a movie! From what I’ve read, the movie is sort of like the book—not bad, but not making huge waves. I’ll have to watch it sometime.