CODEX

After liking The Magicians, I checked out Lev Grossman’s first novel, excited that it promised to be a literary mystery about searching for a lost book, complete with a bit of romance between scholars, a la Possession. I love suspenseful research scenes and hot library action! (I realize that sounds sarcastic, but it’s not. Judge me if you must.)

Unfortunately, Codex kind of…sucked? The book stuff kept me reading, but there was no payoff. The characters were flat and unlikable, the situations unconvincing, the pacing slow, the plot aimless. My particular beef was that the narrator was supposed to be this hotshot workaholic investment guy (and it suddenly occurs to me that having a character who does nothing but work is a pretty convenient way to explain the fact that he has no personality or believable life whatsoever) who abruptly blows off his job to become obsessed with this book mystery (as well as with a tedious online role-playing game that turns out to be barely tied to the plot). Now, for my money, if you’re going to have a character completely change his personality (a personality we have to take the author’s word for, because we have no evidence it really exists) and spend the entire book saying things along the lines of “he had never acted like this before” or “he had no idea why he was doing this, but he just couldn’t stop himself,” the only plausible explanation is probably going to be mystical. I guess because Grossman handled the supernatural so well in The Magicians, I assumed there might be an otherworldly element to the power of the quest for the codex to upend the narrator’s life. When this turned out not to be the case, the plot felt crushingly mundane to me. Once the questions of whether the codex would be found and what it would say were resolved, I found I didn’t care about the answers. As you can probably tell, the book really frustrated me; it had potential, but the plotting and character development felt so lazy. I actually wish I had skipped this one.