Wicked

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

I tend to start off most posts by telling people how amazing such-and-such a book is and how they should read it when they get a chance. And in some respects Wicked is no different. It was a pretty amazing book. But I’m not sure that I feel comfortable telling people to go read it. Since my new occupation is a high school English teacher, I have been thinking about books in terms of being interesting to a high school reader. And while the story in Wicked might be interesting to a high school reader, Maguire’s prose would elude most high school students, most college undergraduates, and probably a good portion of the general reading public. Which is not to say that it’s bad. It isn’t. It’s wonderful, but it’s not the type of thing that I would recommend to everybody. Not only do you have to have a stellar vocabulary (or be comfortable reading with a good pocket dictionary close at hand like me), you have to be willing to wade through a tremendous amount of ambiguous narrative to find where Maguire is tying to go with his characters.

Unfortunately I don’t think Maguire knew where he wanted his characters to go as he wrote. This indecision plagues the narrative, which is, since I haven’t mentioned it yet, the narrative of the Wicked Witch of the West. There is one truly great section of the book, which is what prompted me to write about it at all. In the middle of the book, Elphaba (the real name of our green-skinned heroine) decides to drop out of college and become an underground freedom fighter (aka terrorist depending on the spin). The event that drove her to this choice is laid out beautifully. Her life as a fiercely independent underground communist-style conspirator is one of the most inspirational and heart-breaking pieces of writing I’ve read. The whole ‘Wizard of Oz’ gimmick aside, the middle of Wicked is truly amazing writing. It’s hard to recommend one part of a book that is so utterly dependent on everything else, but if it were possible I’d tell folks to read Part III, City of Emeralds. It truly is beautiful.

Part of the ambiguity problem I mentioned above has to deal with the metaphysical direction the book takes in the end. Maguire maps out a complex metaphysics that would have given the book a whole different flavor if he had just elucidated it more in the first 300 pages instead of the last 50 or so. I felt disconcerted at this entirely new direction and frustrated by the meager hint-bones he threw out earlier in the book. I appreciate writers who play around for the first 100 pages or so just to make sure they have the reader’s attention. Umberto Eco is a great example of this type of writer. The first 100 pages of The Name of the Rose are absurdly boring and academic, but he goes on to deliver several big time homeruns in the rest of the book. The big hits in Wicked come, as I mentioned, in the middle of the book, and the ending, to follow the metaphor, is a failed bunt. And I don’t really want to lead readers astray by recommending a failed bunt. Sometimes it’s fun watch a great baseball game with a lousy ending, and Wicked is no different. The middle innings are grand, worth the price of admission to me at least, but you’ll go home disappointed. And there’s a helluva lot of other games out there that’ll keep you riveted the whole way through.