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Ninth House (Bardugo)
4/5. OK let's give Bardugo a Hugo nomination, can we?? (2 more weeks for nominations!) I don't think this book necessarily ought to win a Hugo, but it's doing some very interesting things that I don't think anyone else in the field is really doing in the same way.
This is a book about Alex, a teen dropout/street kid who can see ghosts (these two things are very related), which gets her a scholarship to Yale under the auspices of the Yale secret society Lethe, which exists to watch over the other secret societies as they do their various magic rituals, all of which basically boil down to "use magic to consolidate money and/or power." And the book leans hard into that, and -- oh, here, have a quote from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants's review which you should all read anyway because it's much more coherent and awesome than this rambly review is going to be (and indeed ensured that not only did I decide I was going to read it, but I downloaded the Kindle sample that day):
It's horror/dark fantasy, but apparently the kind of horror that doesn't squick me out? There's a lot that could squick someone -- it gets pretty graphic at times -- but it's usually heavily telegraphed and has so much plot surrounding it that I think there was only one place where I started flipping to get through it quickly. Also I think part of it is because the real horror of it is not the rape or the violence (both of which are present in this book), but the institutionalized horror, the horror that seems on the surface pretty and nice.
I also thought it was really interesting how Bardugo talked about power and the ways that power corrupts, all of which is very much woven into the worldbuilding and the plot. I mean, there's the whole institutionalized privilege thatskygiants talks about, and then in sort of the personal version of that, there's how individual people react to having power (often in an institutionalized fashion, but not always): almost always badly, often very badly. But not always. (And in that "not always" is what hope there is, in the book.)
I also found the parallel between Alex's ability and mental disorders quite interesting. Because Alex can see ghosts and no one else can (and sometimes the ghosts are violent towards her -- but others can see her reaction and not the ghosts, of course), she gets into all kinds of trouble, primarily socially. And eventually she starts self-medicating with alcohol and weed. And of course her mother doesn't know what to do about it...
One review I saw compared it to The Magicians in the sense of talking about how magic isn't like Narnia, it isn't an escape, it isn't numinous. The way magic can be misused is an explicit theme in the book -- and yet I liked Ninth House rather more than I liked The Magicians.ase wondered if this was because it didn't have terrible Quentin POV, which... yeah, is probably a large part of it. (Alex is a great POV!) I think also that Bardugo gives it more ambiguity; magic is usually awful and because people are usually awful, people usually use it in awful ways. But occasionally... yes, it can be numinous; occasionally there is grace. But it's a kind of grace that is dependent upon people, really; not as intrinsic to the magic itself as we might like to think.
It also, like Six of Crows, ends on a cliffhanger, so be aware of that. I mean, the main storyline is wrapped up well, but there's one significant loose end that is dangling out there the whole time, and that is the cliffhanger to jumpstart the (presumed) next book.
But what I really want to talk about is that I had a... rather visceral reaction to this book in a lot of ways, not least because my alma mater was... more like than unlike the university in this book. (This is a big reason why I was so interested in reading it.)
Some of the things I thought about while reading it:
-Yale has ~6,000 undergrads, and the book honestly felt like there were about 200. Which is fine! I mostly interacted with about that many people myself! But every so often I'd be all "...but the great thing about college is that it doesn't have to be like that!" I mean, yes, Alex has to be in that world for worldbuilding and plot reasons, but I kept wanting e.g. her roommate Mercy to get the heck out and into another social group. Yale is a big place! You don't have to go to terrible parties! (Also, super side-eyeing Darlington (whom I otherwise really liked!) for making the snap judgment that their other roommate, Anna, "would never quite fit. She'd end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church"? What's so wrong about that again?? She'd never fit in Darlington's Yale, but... it's actually true that there is more than one way to fit into a place like Yale.)
-My parents very consciously tried to make my sister and me into one of the "haves" portrayed in the book. (My dad spent a lot of time receiving charity from upper-middle/upper-class people in high school after his own family failed miserably at parenting him, and spent a lot of time thinking about how to replicate that sort of life, if not for himself, then for his children. He's writing his memoirs right now and they are really extremely interesting and also really kind of awful -- but anyway.) Music lessons from a young age, tennis lessons for literally years (which sadly for my parents never worked; my tennis skills are significantly worse than D's, and I think his tennis is basically "went out and faffed around with his family sometimes during high school"); they made sure I knew how to ski. In case, they said, someone invites you skiing or playing tennis, then you'll know how to do it.
Interestingly, my parents got it very right and not right at all. The not right at all: it's not really about playing tennis, exactly (although maybe it would have helped had I been any good at it); there's a social aspect of being a "have" that there is no way in heck my parents would ever have been able to teach me, if they had even understood that it existed, which they didn't. (I wouldn't have been able to learn, either, but that's a separate issue.) I mean, I think it can be taught, and is taught -- but by people who move in that world and understand how to move in that world, which definitely wasn't my parents, and isn't me. (This is very, very visible in Ninth House. I was totally not surprised to find out that Bardugo lived this.)
The way my parents did get it right is twofold.
(1) Going to a certain type of college, all by itself, makes one a "have." (And that's what my parents were hoping for, too.) In some ways this happens in a good way -- we were always told we could do whatever we wanted, and mostly let alone to do whatever we wanted, and we were mostly driven type A personalities anyhow; and so one came out pretty sure that one could change the world if one really wanted to, or at least rise to the top of whatever random thing we were working on. (Of course, many of us then had crises in our 20's or 30's, when it became clear that we weren't, in fact, changing the world. But that's another story for another time.) (But on being left to our own devices, I found it utterly believable that the world of Ninth House just... let the undergrads loose with all these horrifically powerful things. Yup.)
It also happens in a not-great way; when one tells someone one went to that type of college and their eyes widen and you know they've just updated their prior beliefs in a specific and rather unfortunate-in-the-way-of-propagating-institutional-privilege way.
And that is, of course, exactly the kind of privilege that Alex herself wants very much, and you really can't fault her for it. Which, of course, ties in to all these structures of power that Bardugo is interested in examining.
(2) There's another, parallel, group of haves, though the mechanism is different: the scholars, the academics. And even though I am no longer in the academic world, there's a certain kind of language, a certain kind of privilege, that one has by virtue of being in that group. And this is a group where if you're the Right Type of Person, the language can be learned by someone who didn't have a coach, growing up, the same way you can make a ton of money or go to Yale even if your family isn't going to be able to help you very much -- but obviously if your parents already belong to that group, it helps a lot, and the more resources your parents have to throw at belonging to that group, the better. (My parents had resources -- not tons of money, although they really tried to give us anything educational or quasi-educational (like tennis) that they could -- but they had the tenacity and math skills to tutor us for a while, to a rather greater degree than most parents. Although to be fair they had very few pedagogical skills, but again that's another story.) All of this is only tangentially covered in Ninth House, to a certain extent with the character of Professor Belbalm -- but it also pinged oddly to me that Mercy isn't more into that world, because she of all the characters has been groomed to be part of that world.
And... more to the point of the larger themes, D and I want our kids to belong to that group of haves. We have a lot of resources, too; D and I have the academics skills, and I also have rather more pedagogical skills than my mom, for that matter, though probably not nearly as much tenacity. The question is, when does good parenting (or good self-advocacy, in Alex's case) run up against the line of perpetuating institutional privilege? In Ninth House, when a particular mildly-spoilery bargain is proposed and taken, where does that fall? I think we're meant to realize it falls squarely on the latter side of the line, even if we totally understand and even empathize with taking it.
Anyway. So yeah, this made me think a lot. I liked The Magicians despite all the really obnoxious things about it because it made me think; Ninth House made me think, and think about deeper things than Magicians, without that particular brand of obnoxiousness. But yeah, all the content notes for this one, and curiously, although I loved it, like Magicians I will probably never reread the whole thing. (Not because of the graphic content; I can't articulate exactly why.)
This is a book about Alex, a teen dropout/street kid who can see ghosts (these two things are very related), which gets her a scholarship to Yale under the auspices of the Yale secret society Lethe, which exists to watch over the other secret societies as they do their various magic rituals, all of which basically boil down to "use magic to consolidate money and/or power." And the book leans hard into that, and -- oh, here, have a quote from
skygiants's review which you should all read anyway because it's much more coherent and awesome than this rambly review is going to be (and indeed ensured that not only did I decide I was going to read it, but I downloaded the Kindle sample that day):
Lethe House, the secret society that watches over all of Yale's other secret societies, which all specialize in different mildly horrific and unethical varieties of magic to ... boost the careers of their alumni! That's it, that's all they want to do. It's one hundred percent plausible and one hundred percent gross and a perfect literalized metaphor for the way systems of institutionalized privilege and Yale's actual real-world secret societies work in the real, non-magical world. Literally nothing about this worldbuilding required suspension of disbelief in any way.
It's horror/dark fantasy, but apparently the kind of horror that doesn't squick me out? There's a lot that could squick someone -- it gets pretty graphic at times -- but it's usually heavily telegraphed and has so much plot surrounding it that I think there was only one place where I started flipping to get through it quickly. Also I think part of it is because the real horror of it is not the rape or the violence (both of which are present in this book), but the institutionalized horror, the horror that seems on the surface pretty and nice.
I also thought it was really interesting how Bardugo talked about power and the ways that power corrupts, all of which is very much woven into the worldbuilding and the plot. I mean, there's the whole institutionalized privilege that
skygiants talks about, and then in sort of the personal version of that, there's how individual people react to having power (often in an institutionalized fashion, but not always): almost always badly, often very badly. But not always. (And in that "not always" is what hope there is, in the book.)I also found the parallel between Alex's ability and mental disorders quite interesting. Because Alex can see ghosts and no one else can (and sometimes the ghosts are violent towards her -- but others can see her reaction and not the ghosts, of course), she gets into all kinds of trouble, primarily socially. And eventually she starts self-medicating with alcohol and weed. And of course her mother doesn't know what to do about it...
One review I saw compared it to The Magicians in the sense of talking about how magic isn't like Narnia, it isn't an escape, it isn't numinous. The way magic can be misused is an explicit theme in the book -- and yet I liked Ninth House rather more than I liked The Magicians.
ase wondered if this was because it didn't have terrible Quentin POV, which... yeah, is probably a large part of it. (Alex is a great POV!) I think also that Bardugo gives it more ambiguity; magic is usually awful and because people are usually awful, people usually use it in awful ways. But occasionally... yes, it can be numinous; occasionally there is grace. But it's a kind of grace that is dependent upon people, really; not as intrinsic to the magic itself as we might like to think.It also, like Six of Crows, ends on a cliffhanger, so be aware of that. I mean, the main storyline is wrapped up well, but there's one significant loose end that is dangling out there the whole time, and that is the cliffhanger to jumpstart the (presumed) next book.
But what I really want to talk about is that I had a... rather visceral reaction to this book in a lot of ways, not least because my alma mater was... more like than unlike the university in this book. (This is a big reason why I was so interested in reading it.)
Some of the things I thought about while reading it:
-Yale has ~6,000 undergrads, and the book honestly felt like there were about 200. Which is fine! I mostly interacted with about that many people myself! But every so often I'd be all "...but the great thing about college is that it doesn't have to be like that!" I mean, yes, Alex has to be in that world for worldbuilding and plot reasons, but I kept wanting e.g. her roommate Mercy to get the heck out and into another social group. Yale is a big place! You don't have to go to terrible parties! (Also, super side-eyeing Darlington (whom I otherwise really liked!) for making the snap judgment that their other roommate, Anna, "would never quite fit. She'd end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church"? What's so wrong about that again?? She'd never fit in Darlington's Yale, but... it's actually true that there is more than one way to fit into a place like Yale.)
-My parents very consciously tried to make my sister and me into one of the "haves" portrayed in the book. (My dad spent a lot of time receiving charity from upper-middle/upper-class people in high school after his own family failed miserably at parenting him, and spent a lot of time thinking about how to replicate that sort of life, if not for himself, then for his children. He's writing his memoirs right now and they are really extremely interesting and also really kind of awful -- but anyway.) Music lessons from a young age, tennis lessons for literally years (which sadly for my parents never worked; my tennis skills are significantly worse than D's, and I think his tennis is basically "went out and faffed around with his family sometimes during high school"); they made sure I knew how to ski. In case, they said, someone invites you skiing or playing tennis, then you'll know how to do it.
Interestingly, my parents got it very right and not right at all. The not right at all: it's not really about playing tennis, exactly (although maybe it would have helped had I been any good at it); there's a social aspect of being a "have" that there is no way in heck my parents would ever have been able to teach me, if they had even understood that it existed, which they didn't. (I wouldn't have been able to learn, either, but that's a separate issue.) I mean, I think it can be taught, and is taught -- but by people who move in that world and understand how to move in that world, which definitely wasn't my parents, and isn't me. (This is very, very visible in Ninth House. I was totally not surprised to find out that Bardugo lived this.)
The way my parents did get it right is twofold.
(1) Going to a certain type of college, all by itself, makes one a "have." (And that's what my parents were hoping for, too.) In some ways this happens in a good way -- we were always told we could do whatever we wanted, and mostly let alone to do whatever we wanted, and we were mostly driven type A personalities anyhow; and so one came out pretty sure that one could change the world if one really wanted to, or at least rise to the top of whatever random thing we were working on. (Of course, many of us then had crises in our 20's or 30's, when it became clear that we weren't, in fact, changing the world. But that's another story for another time.) (But on being left to our own devices, I found it utterly believable that the world of Ninth House just... let the undergrads loose with all these horrifically powerful things. Yup.)
It also happens in a not-great way; when one tells someone one went to that type of college and their eyes widen and you know they've just updated their prior beliefs in a specific and rather unfortunate-in-the-way-of-propagating-institutional-privilege way.
And that is, of course, exactly the kind of privilege that Alex herself wants very much, and you really can't fault her for it. Which, of course, ties in to all these structures of power that Bardugo is interested in examining.
(2) There's another, parallel, group of haves, though the mechanism is different: the scholars, the academics. And even though I am no longer in the academic world, there's a certain kind of language, a certain kind of privilege, that one has by virtue of being in that group. And this is a group where if you're the Right Type of Person, the language can be learned by someone who didn't have a coach, growing up, the same way you can make a ton of money or go to Yale even if your family isn't going to be able to help you very much -- but obviously if your parents already belong to that group, it helps a lot, and the more resources your parents have to throw at belonging to that group, the better. (My parents had resources -- not tons of money, although they really tried to give us anything educational or quasi-educational (like tennis) that they could -- but they had the tenacity and math skills to tutor us for a while, to a rather greater degree than most parents. Although to be fair they had very few pedagogical skills, but again that's another story.) All of this is only tangentially covered in Ninth House, to a certain extent with the character of Professor Belbalm -- but it also pinged oddly to me that Mercy isn't more into that world, because she of all the characters has been groomed to be part of that world.
And... more to the point of the larger themes, D and I want our kids to belong to that group of haves. We have a lot of resources, too; D and I have the academics skills, and I also have rather more pedagogical skills than my mom, for that matter, though probably not nearly as much tenacity. The question is, when does good parenting (or good self-advocacy, in Alex's case) run up against the line of perpetuating institutional privilege? In Ninth House, when a particular mildly-spoilery bargain is proposed and taken, where does that fall? I think we're meant to realize it falls squarely on the latter side of the line, even if we totally understand and even empathize with taking it.
Anyway. So yeah, this made me think a lot. I liked The Magicians despite all the really obnoxious things about it because it made me think; Ninth House made me think, and think about deeper things than Magicians, without that particular brand of obnoxiousness. But yeah, all the content notes for this one, and curiously, although I loved it, like Magicians I will probably never reread the whole thing. (Not because of the graphic content; I can't articulate exactly why.)
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I was in grad school with a sib of the writer of The Magicians. The sib is humbler, while still brilliant, than anything I've ever heard about The Magicians or its writer.
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Ah! That family is rather amazing to me in that all three sibs have done very cool things. (The first one I was aware of was this one, when D bought me a piece.)
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One the one hand I think Bardugo does a good job showing us Alex's roommates and their experience and making it a significant part of Alex's life at Yale even though they're so disconnected from all the magic stuff, and on the other hand, yeah, they could absolutely be having different and richer lives than they get a chance to, really. (And we do occasionally get these mentions of different, totally ordinary social stuff that any of them could be doing, but it mostly plays out through posters or flyers or mentions of 'the movie club meets in this room when people aren't shuffling entrails in it.') I'm curious how that'll play out in future books; I realize Anna thinks they're all witches but they could go hear her sing in her a capella group or whatever she ends up doing!
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Yes! I really really hope they get better lives, this book was rather depressing that way, although I did really like the bond that develops between Mercy and Alex and how they save each other (I saw an interview with Bardugo somewhere where she talks about how she and her roommates saved each other (hopefully not from magical terribleness), but I can't find it now).
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it's actually true that there is more than one way to fit into a place like Yale.
Have you ever been to Yale? I visited friends there for a weekend when I was in college, and... it was a very educational weekend. One weekend does not make me an expert on the culture, but it did impress upon me the ways it was a very different place than even the other Ivies (I have spent Shabbos at the Hillel of every Ivy except Cornell)
The whole residential college thing is a really big deal there. You get sorted like Hogwarts and then there's just all sorts of social events that push you together with the people in your college, until they become your social circle by default. Is it possible to find a different kind of social circle at Yale? Of course, but that's usually via the societies, or via Greek life, or via sports or music or a religious group. It's not at all common to just build a random social circle of people you have met and liked at Yale. That's something that struck me instantly.
[Irrelevantly, my one weekend at Yale was also my only experience of someone getting sent to the ER for alcohol poisoning, and even more strikingly, it was a fairly routine procedure for the people I was visiting, they had the numbers to call at hand, and a well-practiced routine for how to evaluate when a person had to be taken to the hospital. And it also wasn't at any particular massive party, it was just routine drinking in their hall common room/dorm rooms. It was not the worst drinking culture I've seen at an Ivy, that is reserved for Dartmouth, since there is nothing the fuck to do in Hanover New Hampshire on a Friday night except drink. But it was still a startlingly terrible drinking culture. This has had a huge impact on how I understood the Kavanaugh hearings.]
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Now, (a) yes, if I remember correctly they were all in the same college, and (b) my friend is lovely and amazing, and so it does stand to reason that she would have attracted lovely and amazing friends. And I can totally see this not being the case for everyone, or even most people, perhaps?
Is it possible to find a different kind of social circle at Yale? Of course, but that's usually via the societies, or via Greek life, or via sports or music or a religious group. It's not at all common to just build a random social circle of people you have met and liked at Yale.
I mean... not necessarily at my university either, where the residential houses are a big thing as well, though not AS big as at Yale, because we weren't
sortedassigned until sophomore year. I suppose there was at least somewhat more forced mixing among the freshmen, so that more random freshmen became friends. Then we all split off into groups to be sorted, all got separated, and one usually ended up very bonded with one's group, except in some cases like mine, where due to a number of factors (probably mostly my own social immaturity/lack of good social skills) I drifted apart from most of them. (When I talk about the "groups" above that I hung out with, I am in fact talking about these blocking groups in almost all cases -- I'd have a friend and I'd end up hanging with the friend's group.) Most of the friends I had were not from my house, and I at least feel like I was not typical in that regard. Many of the people I hung out with I met through music or church.Something else that I had in a draft of the post but that didn't make it in the final draft is that being in STEM made it different for me as well from the book characters. Many of my friends, including one of my close ones, were made in our classes via struggling with problem sets together late at night. My freshman roommate was in Lit, and her experience was totally different; she didn't meet people freshman year from her field because they were just writing solitary papers and the classes were all large lecture classes. I think this changed later on when she had more upper-level small seminars.
ETA: Something about my university that I think is probably pretty common to this kind of school: most people I knew were into something (since this kind of school strongly selects for that), and they generally got really into whatever extracurricular they chose, pouring a lot of time and effort into them: I knew people who were into student government, the campus newspaper, their acapella group, their religion (sometimes mine, sometimes another one), etc. So the majority of people that I knew did by default have some other kind of outlet that informed their social life. (Mine was music. I spent ten hours a week in rehearsal, for no credit, which is something that seems bizarre to me now. Plus there was the year I took music theory, which had a composition as the final project, and some large part of second term was spent rehearsing people's compositions. In retrospect I'm not entirely sure how I passed my classes that semester.)
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Now, I do get the impression that Bardugo herself had a social experience not entirely unlike the kids in the book, though hopefully at least somewhat less depressing and awful. So obviously my experience isn't the only kind one can have.