Book Review : Christopher Zeischegg - The Magician (2020)

Nov 29

Nov 29 Book Review : Christopher Zeischegg - The Magician (2020)

When I first heard of Christopher Zeischegg, he was reputable among a small circle of transgressive authors for writing a novel called The Magician. As it is often the case with cult novels, the buzz doesn’t have a clear context to it. All you needed to know was that Zeischegg was a former porn actor and The Magician was fucked up. When the always fun and daring Apocalypse Party Press announced a reedition of the novel, I thought it would be a great opportunity to hop on this mysterious hype train.

Maybe I shouldn't have.

The Magician is somewhat of an autofictional novel (although the memoirs-to-fiction ratio might be skewed) about an ex-porn actor named Chris who's life is falling apart. His girlfriend is an addict under the spell of a manipulative sugar daddy. He gets raped and mutilated at some point, which requires him to move back with his mother and her husband far from Los Angeles. Unable to move on from that traumatic event, he meets a woman at an Al-Anon meeting who begrudgingly offers to help with his ordeal.

The Problem with Cowardly Protagonists

One of my pet peeves as a reader is cowardly protagonists. I’m not talking about villainous assholes who scamper away from life threatening ordeals while twirling their metaphorical mustaches. These guys are hilarious. I’m talking about the useless ones who don't want to take responsibility for anything and who point fingers people who are just trying to help them. I understand that it is the entire point of The Magician. Chris is possessed by a demon and needs to exorcize himself. I get that.

But a wise man once told me: "the priest will tell you that you’re possessed, the shrink will tell you that you’re sick, but it's the same fucking thing". The Magician is a solid 250 pages novel, but it's 435 pages long. At some point, it becomes about a dude trying to deal with his trauma while competing at an olympic level of uselessness around the house while his mom is sick. It's different than other autofictions, but it’s not THAT different. That part of the book which I’m referring to is about half of it. Maybe a little less.

There is an ultraviolent, traumatic rape scene at the start and lots LOOOOTS of the most disinterested gay sex scenes you will ever read, which account for the transgressiveness of The Magician and these are interesting elements that never really quite amount to a more insightful bigger picture. Chris does not deal with his trauma whatsoever, he’s pursuing a demon that never really develops a symbolic values throughout the novel. He's just a literal demon possessing our protagonist.

It's fun to be transgressive, but it has to be at the service of something.

The Refusal of the Real

Now I'm not gonna tell you this is a book about nothing and that it's all shock value and moping for the sake of shock value and moping, because it wouldn't be true. What happens to Chris is that what he’s going through is so cruel and painful that he refuses to take it at face value. That’s why he starts investigating underlying forces that shape reality and for most of the novel, it’s kind of up to you to decide the meaning of what Chris is going through. Is he possessed or just coping with extreme trauma?

Unfortunately, The Magician provides a pretty straightforward answer to this question at the end that you can choose to believe or interpret yourself. I thought it was passing the buck as to bear the responsibility to give meaning to the novel, but some people don’t like open ending and I guess Christopher Zeischegg is one of these people. What I mean to say is that I love the themes and ideas explored in The Magician, but I disliked how they were explored. It's a personal thing. We each explore meaning in our own way.

The Magician is really two novels: a shocking and powerful one for the first two hundred pages and a bad, bloated and frustrating one in its latter half. I’m not gonna debate with you if you thought it was the most brilliant thing you’ve ever read. I'm just going to agree to disagree. This is not a book I’m ever gonna go out of my way to debate. Literature is a process that has to be done in good faith by the author and the reader and I don’t believe either of us were there by the time I was done with the book.