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By most metrics, the author Lev Grossman’s life appeared to change irrevocably in 2009. After publishing two books in relative obscurity, he released The Magicians, a novel about troubled kids who get invited to a magic school and fall backward into another universe. It became a best seller, and the reviews were giddy. Two more successful books in the series followed; Hollywood adapted the trilogy into a hit TV show on Syfy. Grossman asserted his place as an important stakeholder in genre fiction, helping move it from the margins of publishing to where it is now — the financial center of the book world. By 2016, he was happily married with three children and had at last quit his magazine job to write full time. Grossman also announced he was feeling confident about his newest novel. It would revisit King Arthur’s England.
Eight years later, that book, The Bright Sword, is finally here. “Books, they fight dirty,†Grossman tells me at one of his old haunts, Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, in late June. “You never know where the resistance is coming from.†He’s in the U.S. with his family on a promotion tour and victory lap (they live in Australia). They’ve rented out their house in Clinton Hill, but fortunately the tenants are away for the summer, handily leaving it furnished for them.
Grossman left the city, his home of 26 years, in September 2022. “I think I burned out a little on New York and Brooklyn,†he says. He moved for a variety of reasons — raising children is difficult here, and his wife, an English professor who was at Princeton, is Australian (she’s now teaching at the University of Sydney). “It would probably be incorrect to say that I moved to Sydney because I was really stuck on my novel, but it was in there a little bit,†he says. “A little bit like, ‘I’ve tried everything else; now we will change hemispheres and see if it gets any better.’â€
He’s used to a certain degree of struggle when it comes to his writing. “Keep in mind that The Magicians was my first hit, and that came when I was 40,†Grossman says. “I previously had two flops. If I had then two more flops? I’ve got three kids; they’ve got to eat. I had to sort of bet on myself. But it took a lot of sidestepping before I finally did.â€
One reason The Bright Sword took so long was that Grossman initially kept his day job as a journalist. “I only ever wanted to write fiction, but I was really bad at it for a long time, so I needed to support myself. Being a journalist is what I ended up doing. But it wasn’t my childhood dream,†he says. “From the outside, it looked like I had a mid-career pivot to writing novels. I was always writing novels. It was just that people didn’t want to buy them.â€
We had begun our Brooklyn tour at Greenlight, but now Grossman has successfully navigated us to the hole-in-the-wall Kitten Café in Bed-Stuy, only second-guessing himself once to check his phone, a little sad that he’d lost the courage of his convictions. There, a man named Klever (truly; I saw his driver’s license) makes him an oat-milk cappuccino. At 55, Grossman is trim in the manner of somebody who runs a lot (which he does in Sydney) and has exchanged his formerly customary New England attire for clothes that look vaguely Swedish. He answers my questions cautiously, anxious about saying anything self-pitying or self-aggrandizing.
He grew up in the suburbs of Boston, the youngest child of an academic-poet father and an academic-novelist mother. He got his bachelor’s degree in literature at Harvard and went to Yale for a master’s degree in comparative literature. “I was really good at getting good grades and nothing else, and it turned out to be a less useful skill in the real world than I realized,†he says. “I went back to school, started a Ph.D., did that for three years, but it was really clear that I wasn’t cut out for comparing literatures for a living or teaching or any of that stuff.â€
He moved to New York, as aspiring novelists tend to do, in 1996. He wanted to be a writer, and when he wasn’t too depressed to type, he managed to finish his first novel. Titled Warp, the book is about horny young people in Boston who are pop-culture and irony poisoned and wander around and talk. He got $6,000 for it, and it received lackluster reviews. In need of money, Grossman started applying to media jobs.
“I remember answering an ad in the newspaper,†he says, “and it was like ‘Literary magazine seeks qualified assistant’ and I went and it was The New Yorker. They’d done a thing where they didn’t tip their hand. I went in for my interview, and I was like, I’m going to work at The New Yorker! It’s all going to be okay! And I didn’t get the job. It seemed like I’d found the thing you click on in the game where you win, but it didn’t turn out that way.â€
He did fall into media eventually, though. “I ended up working for a magazine company but not in a writing capacity. I had to look at the message boards and delete obscenity, libel, hate speech, and copyright violations.†This was how he started at Time; he also managed coders in the web division for four years before eventually becoming a book critic for the magazine. “Keep in mind one thing I had going for me was that I was clinically depressed. I did not expect happiness. I just worked away.â€
He published his second novel, Codex, a thriller of sorts, in 2004. It probably didn’t feel good at the time, but the reviews were decent and it wasn’t a financial disaster. It just didn’t open a portal, or unleash magic wishes, or fix his serotonin-reuptake issues. Sometimes you publish a book and no one really cares. But everything changed that year anyway.
“Two things happened,†he says. “My then-wife and I had a child, which I think unlocked a lot of frozen emotions for me. I got very emotional, feeling close to this child in a way that I hadn’t felt close to anybody before. It made me want to get healthier, and so I went to therapy. That was also the year that I started writing Magicians. Everything turned on that year. I guess I should say that I realized that I was in the wrong marriage at that time also and started getting out.â€
He realized that better mental health made the writing stronger. “In our family, everybody has done some kind of writing or creative work. There’s an association of poor mental health with creativity. I think that we actually probably shared a sense that, ‘Look, this is where the art comes from.’ It turned out to be wrong. Completely wrong.â€
He also read a great book. “Another thing that happened in 2004 is I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. That, without question, was the book where I looked at it and I thought, I’ve been doing it wrong. And then: I want to be doing this instead.†Susanna Clarke’s book is an alternate history of England with magic, one of those exceptional, near-perfect books, utterly persuasive and yet old-fashioned. The book gave him the permission to eschew the literary fiction of his early novels (“They had a chilly quality. The writing came slow and hard,†he wrote in the New York Times in 2014) and embrace the fantasy he had always loved reading as a child.
In 2014, Grossman started kicking around the idea of a reimagining of King Arthur. “After I finished the Magicians books, I was casting about for something new to write about,†he says. He’d loved The Once and Future King since he read it in junior high. But it “had begun to feel a little dusty — not dated exactly, but somehow no longer of our time, and I wondered what it would be like to write a version of King Arthur that felt like it belonged right now.†He was thinking also about Game of Thrones — “how the engine of that story is the death of the king, which kicks off a massive succession crisis, and the whole world falls apart, and I wondered how the story would go if that king who died was King Arthur.†Those pieces came together as one. “How do people live in that dark, broken world and find hope and carry on? That felt very real to me and very urgent. Because that world feels a lot like our world.†On the surface, The Bright Sword is a straightforward Arthurian tale — a boy named Collum comes to Camelot and wants to be a knight. But there’s bad news: King Arthur is dead. Most of the Round Table is dead or missing, too. Merlin is trapped under a hill. The survivors are entrusted to pick up the pieces of Britain and find a new king for the country. This makes it sound like a musty faux-historical novel, but actually it’s a super-weird, messy fantasy book with swords and faeries and other dimensions. While writing, Grossman put up giant maps of post-Roman England that then promptly fell down. Enormous Australian mosquitoes circled around him in his very bare office, a basement room equipped with a trestle table next to the laundry room. But he finished the book and it’s already in development for a TV series.
Now back in Brooklyn for the book tour, he’s feeling a bit nostalgic. He got on the troubled G train for the first time in ages.
“We got to Myrtle-Willoughby, and I was like, Oh my God, my old stop. I can’t believe I spent so much time here,†he says. “The tears were starting to come.†A few stops later, he arrived at Clinton-Washington, which is actually where his place is. “I don’t know what I was getting so upset about. I’ve lost it if I’m getting choked up at Myrtle-Willoughby.â€
As to the question of why the book took so long to write, eventually he tells me he thinks it has something to do with writing the interior lives of so many different characters. “I was struggling with the voice of it. Some of them, it was easy, easy for them to talk, and others didn’t really want to talk in the way that I felt like they should. And I think there was just a lot of stuff in this story, things that I had carefully avoided while writing The Magicians, anyway.â€
Such as? “We don’t get into marriage in The Magicians. People get married, but we don’t go into their marriage in an interesting way. There’s very little stuff about parents and children, and Arthur is all about fathers and sons.†Maybe he’s just growing up: “I guess I needed to stretch my writing talent a bit and it took a while.â€