Aghast

It is disappointing to report how disappointing Gregory Maguire's Wicked seems to me. I did not, and do not, resist the appropriation and re-evaluation of a familiar story--I welcome it, as the ground of, for instance, some of Angela Carter's most imaginative writing; Tanith Lee's; Robin McKinley. Maguire's book, however, depressed me by the heavy, groping quality of its language. The novelist, unable to create or sustain a character, gives all his poor puppets a gleeless variety of ill-correlated emotions: they are all, male, female, human, or otherwise, all over the map. I was dismayed by the relentless, childish dwelling on excretion and swelling; every one of the players is venal and vulgar. In a great novel, even the foolish and wicked are not entirely beyond our understanding; the good writer's central characters suffer and laugh as we would, and so we join in their deeds and sorrows. What a fool Emma Woodhouse is! And Gwendolen Harleth! but we love them. We want to shake Emma Bovary out of her stupid dreams, but we love her. Nowhere in Wicked are we inclined to love, even in disbelief and despair.
Worst of all, perhaps, Maguire, in his superficial cleverness, has traduced and diminished the brilliant whimsy of Baum. Baum's world was never without its shadows and puzzles and mysteries: but his Oz was a place of near-volcanic creative energy, where anything might happen. Maguire's Oz is a police state--nowhere you'd want to raise a child.