Local Author Lev Grossman On Escaping Brooklyn Without Leaving It

No matter how much he loved Brooklyn, Lev Grossman was occasionally overcome with the desire to leave it. That feeling (a familiar one to many Brooklyn residents after a crowded commute on the F train) was one of the inspirations for his Magicians trilogy, most of which he wrote here in Brooklyn.

“It’s hard to imagine somewhere farther from Narnia than Park Slope,” Grossman said. “When Brooklyn got to be too much, being able to flee into this green, magical, fictional otherworld became very appealing, and that certainly was a major influence on what I chose to write about.”

The Magicians, the first book in the series, opens with a scene on 5th Avenue in Park Slope in which the main character is imagining himself elsewhere. He eventually stumbles out of Brooklyn and into a school for magic, and finally into the magical world of Fillory.

The Magicians was Grossman’s third novel and was published when he was 35, followed by The Magician King and The Magician’s Land. Before he wrote the trilogy, he says he lived the life of an impoverished graduate student and disgruntled web programmer.

“It’s is a weird city to be poor in,” Grossman said of New York. At times the city can feel as if another world lies behind every brownstone door and a secret garden beyond every locked cast-iron gate. Also, he said, the extreme contrast between rich and poor gives rise to these fantasies of what’s happening on the floor where the elevator never stops.

Now he’s settled in Clinton Hill with his wife and three children, ages 11, 5, and 2. The three books have all been bestsellers and are in the process of being adapted into a series for the SyFy channel — Grossman says is happy with what he’s seen of it so far, though he is not intimately involved with the production.

[pullquote]“When you have 50 copies of a book in your house and your daughter is determined to read it, it’s very hard to keep it out of her hands.”
–Lev Grossman[/pullquote]His 11-year-old daughter, somewhat to his dismay, has already read The Magicians.

“When you have 50 copies of a book in your house and your daughter is determined to read it,” he said, “it’s very hard to keep it out of her hands.”

He’d have preferred she waited to read it when she was 35. Like life in this world, the book contains plenty of violence, swearing, and sex. In contrast, and to Grossman’s delight, she’s recently discovered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which he feels is more age-appropriate.

Between three children and a job at TIME Magazine, Grossman says he writes fiction whenever and wherever he can, sometimes at the Greene Grape Annex and occasionally on the G and F trains, with a computer on his lap.

He is currently working on his next novel. He won’t give too much away, except to say that it belongs to a different part of the fantasy family than the Magicians trilogy, which was a descendant of the work of C.S. Lewis, Phillip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling. He also mentioned reading Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and old Welsh epics as research for the new book, which could be another clue.

“I sort of emerge from the fog of magic and swords and pre-industrial English landscapes, and then suddenly I’m flying to Silicon Valley to interview some 22-year-old billionaire about their web startup,” said Grossman, who is TIME’s book critic and lead technology writer. “Sometimes, the transition can be bumpy.”

Somewhat rough transitions have often been a part of his life. Grossman comes from a family of writers. His father was the poet Allen Grossman and his mother was also a novelist. This meant growing up in a household stuffed with books and surrounded by readers. It was also part of the reason it took him a long time to define himself as a writer.

“There were a lot of other voices in my head, and it was hard to figure out which one was mine,” he said.

His twin brother, Austin Grossman is also a novelist. His new book, Crooked, has just been published. (They also have a sister, who’s a sculptor.) Lev Grossman has some theories about why both twins ended up writing fantasy.

“There was a lot of escape going on in our family,” he said. “Some families gravitate together centripetally, and there are other families where everybody just goes off to their corners. Ours was definitely the second kind. We were all in the same house, but we were all dreaming our private dreams and spending a lot of time not in this reality.”

In life and in writing, the brothers have both influenced and supported each other.

“Reading his stuff is part of what unlocked me as a writer,” said Lev.

They will appear together to discuss Austin’s new book at Greenlight Bookstore (686 Fulton Street) tonight, Thursday, August 13 at 7:30pm.