"Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link

[[deleted user]]

This is our discussion of the novella....

"Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link

The story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September 2005. its since appeared in several collections and anthologies, including:

Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link
Pretty Monsters: Stories by Kelly Link
Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 edited by Mike Resnick

[Andreas]

It won (or was nominated for) a row of awards in 2006 - Nebula, Locus, BSFA, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Theodor Sturgeon Awards.

I had a bit trouble finding the novella - there seem to be different editions of Magic for Beginners: Stories. Some of them don't contain the eponymous story. That's why I began reading it online.

It seems to be a quite long novella or a short novel and certainly has its own style which feels like magical realism.
Main protagonist Jeremy Mars is a fan of soap opera "The Library". He likes to hang out with his friends. So far, so normal, yet, for a coming-of-age story. Let's see where it is leading us.

[[deleted user]]

Andreas wrote: " had a bit trouble finding the novella - there seem to be different editions of Magic for Beginners: Stories. Some of them don't contain the eponymous story. That's why I began reading it online...."

That's weird, having a collection that doesn't contain the story for which it's titled. Thanks for reprising the link. F&SF posted it on their website back in 2006 when it was under award consideration, but has since removed it, though it's still available through the Internet Archive's wayback machine.

FWIW, It definitely is contained in the current e-book edition of Magic for Beginners: Stories.

By the way, we previous Discussed Kelly Link's short story The Lady and the Fox as part of our Anthology discussion of Best SF #9 earlier in the year.

BTW, I noticed when Clarkesworld magazine surveyed its Authors about which short story authors had most influenced their writing, Kelly Link appeared in the top 10.

[[deleted user]]

Andreas wrote: "Main protagonist Jeremy Mars is a fan of soap opera "The Library". He likes to hang out with his friends. So far, so normal, yet, for a coming-of-age story. Let's see where it is leading us. ..."

Let's start with that, because I had some initial confusion, which I assume was intentional on Link's part. The 2nd paragraph starts:

In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont.

Which makes it sound like Jeremy is a fictional character in the TV show (i.e., a fictional character within a fictional story, very recursive.) The story then goes on to talk about Jeremy and his friends as fans of the TV show.

What's up with that?

[Andreas]

G33z3r wrote: "What's up with that? "
Nice finding!
So Jeremy is in the frame story and in the embedded story - kind of recursive structure. Interesting.

[Andreas]

Now, Jeremy's father wrote another story-within-the story. Of course, our main protagonist is embedded in it. Nothing to worry about, only Jeremy is killed in it, and Jeremy's mother is a bit angry about that. Do we have to worry about him?

[[deleted user]]

Fairly late in the book, there's another reference to the fact that the novella's storyline is indeed being treted as a a TV show itself (non-spoiler):

DO YOU KNOW how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half of the episode? And so when you go to work the next day, you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That's the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn't really a book. It's a television show.

That's followed by an apparent summary of an episode of The Library, which is actually a summary outline of the next part of the main novella story. It's an interesting technique for Link to sketch a summary of a week or more in a couple of paragraphs before getting back to detailed storytelling.

[Andreas]

★★★★★

Jeremy Mars lives a fairly ordinary live with his parents in Platagenet, Vermont. He is a huge fan of a Internet TV show called "The Library" which he likes to watch and discuss with his friends. Reality and TV show weave together, as Jeremy and his friends are both part of the show and of reality. Similar to many stories by P.K. Dick, it is difficult to decide what is what, especially when one of the characters tries to contact Jeremy. Jeremy's father, a horror author, adds to the confusion, when he writes Jeremy into one of his stories. His mother doesn't like the outcome at all and decides to give them a bit room by taking a road trip with Jeremy to Las Vegas, where they inherited a phone booth and a wedding chapel in horror style. Jeremy doesn't like to leave his friends at all, but he takes the chance to safe his favourite TV show character called Fox.

The dialogues, behaviour and characterizations of the pubertal teenagers were realistic, and I liked the different friends. It is hard not to sympathize with that kind of nerdiness, as it touches the heart of every series fan. The story touches everyday questions like the difficulties of marriage, teenage single kids, and the fragility of adolescent friendship. I found it refreshing how it was NOT patronizing or sounding nostalgic.

The whole story asks to be re-read, as I didn't get all the hints in the first pass and the playful language is just beautiful. It is a bit hard to puzzle through the different, tightly woven layers of the narration - there is a lot going on under the surface. At the same time, the story felt familiar and dreamy. The ending is completely open, it really doesn't resolve much - but the novella isn't about the story, but the story about the story. But why is it called "Magic for Beginners"?

And an additional question: Is it really possible to inherit a phone booth?

[Eleanor]

Kelly Link is one of my favorite authors. I love her short stories! She doesn't write enough of them!

I like how many different stories she crams into each story. There is never just one thing going on, and not all the stories are tied together or engineered to join up at the end. Sometimes it's hard to know what the main story is.

[[deleted user]]

Eleanor wrote: "I like how many different stories she crams into each story. ..."

I can't argue with that.

By coincidence, this month's Lightspeed magazine (December 2015) included Kelly Link's novella "The Surfer", which also has a lot of different plot threads going on.

In many ways, both stories are of a type I might usually dislike, because when reaching the end one can't find the point. Their endings seem open (though not arbitrary.) But in both that case and "Magic for Beginners", I enjoyed the characters and storytelling enough to not feel cheated by the lack of a definitive ending.


Andreas wrote: "But why is it called "Magic for Beginners"?..."

I couldn't figure out why "The Surfer" had that title, either. :) Must be a Link thing.

[[deleted user]]

Andreas wrote: "Is it really possible to inherit a phone booth? ..."

You can own the "building". the actual telephone and the service it provides are usually owned by a telecom company. There aren't many left these days, given the proliferation of mobile phones.

One might ask, "why a phone booth?" I guess it provides an easy means of providing Jeremy with the phone number to call, as well as a drop point for the books.

There are a lot of references to books and this story, too. Jeremy's father writes books (including one that gets him into trouble with the Mrs.) In The Library there are Forbidden Books, often spoken about as if they were active characters. and there are the books Jeremy is asked to steal for Fox (never detailed what they are, presumably Forbidden Books?)