The start of the book has an almost Harry Potter-esque feel to it: a kid, dissatisfied with his own life, finds his way into a magical academy where his hopes for a better life can come true. However, that's about all the two have in common, and that I am thankful for. (Don't get me wrong -- I like HP just fine. I just don't want to see it re-done.)
Quentin Coldwater is an unhappy teenager -- he wants something better out of life, something more like his favorite fantasy land, Fillory. When he stumbles onto Brakebills Academy, a magical college for talented students, he is overjoyed: not only is magic real, but he has the opportunity to study it! The problem is that Quentin is not a particularly happy or optimistic person; instead, he's whiny, self-centered, and only occasionally pleasant. Overall, he is not a fun character to follow through a novel, and that's where my issues with this book begin.
Quentin does not agree.
Quentin wants life to be easy. Quentin wants magic to be magic, not work. And Quentin wants to be happy. The problem for him is that happiness is his goal, and it eludes him the more he focuses on it. First, he thinks studying magic will make him happy. It's such a huge change from his average high school life before Brakebills that it must be able to make him happy. And it works -- for a little while. After a year or two, that happiness fades, so Quentin gets involved with his friend Alice. At first, they make a great couple, and for a while Quentin is indeed happy. But eventually that fades too. Quentin is desperately waiting for Alice to make him happy, rather than putting any effort into making himself happy. Instead, it's her job. She even calls him on it at one point, saying that she can't be responsible for his happiness. When he finally discovers that Fillory is real, he wants to escape, to explore and never have any responsibilities and finally be happy. It never works. The cycle repeats over and over, and never once does he stay happy.
Happiness is Quentin's goal, just as it is the goal of so many Americans. But the problem with happiness as a goal is that it is ultimately unattainable. Sure, you can try to be happy, but if that's the only reason you're doing something, then it won't work for long. Happiness is a byproduct of living your life -- if you do things you enjoy, if you associate with people who boost you up, if you find a job or a hobby that energizes you, you will end up happy because your choices make you happy. And on top of that, you can simply choose to be happy -- that may be most telling: when you can choose to be happy in the face of adversity, then perhaps you are truly happy. Quentin doesn't realize what a lot of other people don't realize: Life sucks sometimes, and the only way around it is to make the choice to be happy in spite of it.
My life isn't perfect, just like everyone else. I am fortunate: I have a wonderful husband, a job that I enjoy, and a warm house with plenty of food and Internet access. Supposedly, under the American Dream point of view, these things should make me happy. Fine. There are sucky things about my life too: my family is a little crazy, my job is incredibly stressful, and sometimes our budget runs out before the end of the month. It happens, and by the American Dream point of view, these things should make me unhappy.
But they balance each other out, in terms of my happiness, leaving me in neutral territory. From my perspective, I create my happiness. I am responsible for my own happiness. Sure, the choices I make influence that happiness, but ultimately it is up to me. I choose to be happy every day, despite whatever setbacks I experience. Living my life makes me happy; the ability to make choices, to control my own destiny, to fill my life with both extraordinary and mundane adventures, makes me happy.
No one in my life is responsible for my happiness, a mistake that Quentin makes, a mistake that is made by so many people. American culture is designed to spend time intent on happiness as a goal: I will do X, Y, and Z so I can be happy all the time. But in doing that, people forget to live their lives. Happiness is the lucky byproduct of how we conduct ourselves in our lives; the choice to be happy is the most crucial choice there is.
The misconception that happiness means being happy all the time, that being happy means there are no highs and lows, leads to some major problems within American culture. There are so many issues that relate on some level -- divorces, drinking issues, social media's influence, etc -- that I don't want to talk about, nor do I have the expertise to discuss. But there are so many smaller issues that are just as important, issues like the mental health struggles that so many Americans deal with and the plagues of boredom, over-medication, unhappiness, and therapy that pervade our culture.
The article "How to Land Your Kids in Therapy" by psychologist Lori Gottlieb explains this phenomenon far better than I ever could, but her main point revolves around the plague of unhappiness that faces America. A fellow teacher handed me this article as a resource for teaching an essay style, and it's become an article that my students and I discuss in depth; they are largely the youth that the article discusses, those kids who grow up with everything and so feel vaguely, uncertainly, unhappy in their adult lives. This discussion often becomes something akin to therapy session with my students, one that I am happy to facilitate in an effort to show them the choice to be happy. It is also an article that just happens to agree with my worldview, which of course inherently boosts my admiration for it. I would encourage everyone to read it (in fact I often offer it out to parents and other adults I encounter who complain about the up-and-coming generation of kids I am teaching); let it be said that the psychology of this article not only explains these kids, but also adds a layer of depth to the character of Quentin Coldwater, depth that his spoiled, unhappy personality is currently lacking.
In a way, I think this obsession with happiness that Quentin struggles with feeds into a lot of his behavior. Within the novel, he and his friends seem to spend essentially all their time drinking; there is little time set aside for actual conversation or connection (other than sexual ones). It's not casual, enjoying a beer, drinking -- it's hardcore, drinking to get drunk, binge drinking. Quentin never wants to deal with his life, even when he's so close to being happy with Alice. Instead, he drinks, and drinks a lot -- he celebrates with booze, he commiserates with booze, and so on.
I haven't done the necessary research, so I can only speculate. But I wonder if that same thing happens in American culture today. Binge drinking remains a massive problem for high school and college age students today, and while I understand that part of this stems from kids trying to get as much alcohol into them as fast as possible, I wonder how much of it goes deeper than that. How many people out of all the people out there who drink a lot, are drinking to deal with some other problem? Even a minor one? I don't have an answer, but I'm curious about it.
I realize I'm making it sound like this book is all bad and that Quentin never studies or works hard or does anything at all, and that's not true. Remember back at the beginning: I actually like this novel. The more I think about this novel, the more depth I find it in and the more I like it. But there are so many issues here that I feel like I can't ignore and I'm enjoying myself writing about this book.
So I'm going to make a hard left and go back into the book.
I've noticed an odd pattern in novels and romantic comedies: A couple is unhappy. Rather than admitting it and breaking up, somebody cheats. This naturally upsets the other partner, who then cheats with someone else to get back at the first partner. Once they both figure out what's happened, the duality brings them back together -- they still love each other! -- and they can then work out their issues -- as if this has somehow made the cheating better. Have another pina colada, as the song says.
Speaking as someone who has never cheated nor been cheated on, I have no idea if this actually plays out in such a way in real life. I imagine it does -- that urge for revenge always seems to come up when someone wrongs you, and anger doesn't mix well with quality thinking. So the idea of cheating to get back at a cheater makes perfect sense, as does the idea of unity through shame when both partners feel shitty about what they did. That emotional combination plays out in so much of human activity that I have no doubt that it extends to sexual escapades.
But there are still confusing elements to it. That emotional mix-up can only happen if two people still actually care about each other, like Quentin and Alice. They love each other, but they have trouble dealing with each other -- so to manage it, instead of talking, they just fuck other people. If they actually hated each other, they'd just break up, or cheat and never once feel bad (or kill each other, if CSI is to be believed). I also wonder if this phenomenon works primarily when the original cheater did so "accidentally," again like Quentin -- he wasn't intending to sleep with Janet, he just does out of opportunity and alcohol. He kind of has an excuse, though not a good one. (This does make me think of The Big Bang Theory though: "The implication being that you somehow slipped and fell into her lady parts?" as Sheldon would say. It's an accident, but a wildly avoidable one.) But he still cares about Alice, and she obviously cares about him or she wouldn't try to get back at him by sleeping with Penny.
Hm. I'm not sure how much sense that made.
