Thanks for responding. I guess we’re caught up in the semantics, eh? Magical = extraordinary = ordinary + transcendence. When you refer to the “magical,” you mean the wands and toad legs of say, Harry Potter. Correct? Understandable.

I agree with you. I, too, need to identify some shadow of myself in a novel in order to fully connect with the fictional dreamscape. “Novel of ideas” often leave me feeling like I didn’t get something–like I wasn’t smart enough to understand the author’s onion-layered message. Remember those pixel images that were all the rage in 90s? Stare at them hard enough and a scene was supposed to pop out. Nope. Never saw it. Not once. That’s how I feel about novels where the big idea surpasses the characters and actions.

I like to see my world reflected, but is it bush-league to want to see it just a tiny bit better, more hopeful, than the true mirrored image? Again, I agree with you, yet I see the enticement in reading novels that transport entirely: Tolkien, Lewis, Marquez, etc. I believe the search for utopia is ingrained in our humanity. All we need do is look at our last presidential election. We dream of a better reality. We hope for it. And we certainly love to read about characters who find it, if only for a brief turn of a page.

Thanks for another great post. You never fail to make me reevaluate my own reading and writing!

Sarah
http://www.sarahmccoy.wordpress.com

I’m not sure about the divine. I think maybe I enjoy the transcendent, which might be the same thing you’re talking about. That’s what I was trying to get at with the Gass reference, that a moment, maybe say, eating dinner alone, could become something life changing, that there could be an epiphany there. But see, I think that’s sort of regular daily life transcending kind of thing.

I realize I’m not explaining myself very well here. The post really came out of a realization on my part that many of the books that people love that I don’t involve some sort of “magic,” and then from there, I started thinking a lot about “novels of ideas,” like Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles, and how I rarely care for those either. And the more I thought about it, I just realized that I have to see the world around me reflected back at me. And that struck me as sort of sad, but also sort of interesting, since I know that other people want exactly the opposite.

In your opinion, can the magical exist in the ordinary? And I’m not just talking magical realism in the GG Marquez kind of way. There are elements of life that… well, are simply unexplainable. Moments of, dare I say, magic. Some call it divine, some call it happenstance, some call it supernatural (think Tom Cruise-Area 51). Whatever you call them, they happen–big and small–every day.

So what about novelist who sprinkle their realistic doing-the-dishes-walking-the-dog-eating-an-In-N-Out-Burger-on-the-couch tales with extraordinariness? I’m curious what your take is on them. Yes, the domestic world of “work and crappy weekends” does communalize the reader with the characters and author, but, at least for me, I’ve got to have a spark more. Something transporting, magical– if not in content then in spirit.

Sarah

http://www.sarahmccoy.wordpress.com

On another note, I don’t think I have a specific kind of book I like to read. War and Peace, The God of Small Things, Regeneration, Zazie in the Metro, Dune, Anne of Green Gables, and The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are all in wildly different categories, but I love them all because they are brilliantly realized stories.

Actually I’ve been just trying to figure out why so few of them come through LA in general. I lived in Portland and Seattle and both seem to be stops for all of the SF writers on book tour, and few of them seem to show up down here.