Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
I grew up reading L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels and have also always loved villain-centered stories, whether it was “Grendel” or the Flashman novels. So when I spotted “Wicked” in my local bookstore, it looked like this novel was written just for me. The map inside and the first few pages made it clear that, while author Gregory Maguire might be taking some liberties with what readers think they know about Oz, he was doing so within the context of the Oz lore that Baum set forth a century ago. In other words, this was to be an Oz novel for adults.
Unfortunately, that’s not what was actually delivered. “Wicked” is an Oz novel, but it’s a novel intended to impress people like John Updike and the “New Yorker” editors. It’s one thing to have literary ambitions – frankly, too few American writers bother with writing works of substance or quality in this blockbuster-minded world – but it’s another to sabotage your own storytelling for the sake of lending the appearance of extra literary weight to a novel already sufficiently weighty; it’s gilding the lily, and slowing the novel needlessly.
The story of Elphaba and the (mostly) bloodless political and cultural revolutions Oz is going through leading up to “The Wizard of Oz” is one rich with ideas, social, political and religious. But first time novelist Maguire appears afraid to leave all this out in the open, in the milieu of a fantasy or children’s novel. Instead, he approaches everything in a roundabout fashion, hinting at things, obscuring characters’ intentions and behavior, and even making the main plot thread difficult to puzzle out at times. I don’t dislike such things normally: Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are all favorite stories, and all use the technique to stunning effect. But in those cases, the obfuscation was an integral part of the work, whether it be the (probable) madness of the latter two or the baffling and mysterious bureaucracy of the former. But here, Maguire’s elliptical writing style is, with one exception, something thrust upon fairly straightforward events, not a natural consequence of them. (The single exception is a mysterious encounter at Shiz, the school where the future witches of the east, west and north are all students – their possible indoctrination as sleeper agents of someone attempting to manipulate the course of Ozian politics is creepy and effective, and the girls being put under a spell and/or hypnotized makes the vagueness of this passage work to great effect.)
This is all especially frustrating as Maguire’s storytelling – when he gets out of his own way – is excellent, and the basic framework of the novel is currently the toast of Broadway, in the Grammy-nominated musical version of “Wicked.” While that production is arguably too dumbed-down (Elphaba wanting the Wizard to de-green her may work as a nice parallel to the characters in “The Wizard of Oz,” but it strikes a discordant note for a character with steel for a backbone), it does point to the fact that the story works as a story quite well without needing the self-consciously literary flourishes with which Maguire gilds his story.
In many ways, it would have been nicer if “Wicked” were Maguire’s second novel, not his first: The glimpses of brilliance that fans respond to in the novel might well have been unobscured if he was confident enough in his vision to not have tried to stack the deck and guaranteed the approval of sober-minded literary critics for someone daring to examine modern life through the lens of a classic children’s story.
Recommended for adult fans of the Oz novels or movies willing to wade through a novel not as good as it ought to have been. Those who get discouraged with the sometimes glacial pace and obscure writing style are advised to pick up the “Wicked” musical soundtrack instead, which has full lyrics in the liner notes.
Three stars out of five.
