Arts Vanity: I Am the World’s #1 ‘Wicked’ Understander

It’s a somewhat universal experience for middle-school theatre fans to, after attending and loving a performance of the hit Broadway musical “Wicked,” receive a well-intentioned copy of the novel that the musical was based on, only to be hit full-on in the first chapter by an explicit description of a puppet-show reenactment of a threesome.

This, too, was my experience. But instead of immediately putting the book aside, as I’m guessing many other baby “Wicked” fans did, I kept reading. Scrolling through the e-book on my phone during lunch periods and in between classes, I dove headlong into the clockwork-powered world of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” And I loved it.

I am a “Wicked” girlie at heart. Although the pandemic somewhat killed my theatre fan era, I can still recite large chunks of the musical from memory. At one point, I could list every actress who had played Elphaba or Glinda on Broadway off the top of my head. During my freshman fall, I wrote a horrible thinkpiece for The Crimson about the upcoming “Wicked” movies, which I won’t link here. I love the spectacle of the show, with its sweeping score and steampunk set. “Wicked,” to me, is just about the closest a musical can get to being perfect.

But as the “Wicked” musical celebrated its 20th anniversary this October, I started thinking about the book that inspired it — namely, trying to figure out why I’m so attached to it. The novel begins as basically a grittier, R-rated version of the musical, before veering off-script into Elphaba’s long journey through the bleak Ozian world that Maguire created. It’s often difficult to enjoy Maguire’s writing, which is dense and philosophical and includes at least one sentence on every page that’s so absurd it feels like being hit in the face. It’s harder still to enjoy the plot, which somehow manages to be simultaneously boring and wildly bonkers in a way that’s pure intellectual whiplash.

Maguire doesn’t know how to write women, either. While Elphaba and Glinda are complex characters with phenomenally written inner monologues, the rest of the “Wicked” novel is filled with catty, jealous spinsters and sexy underage girls. In one of the sequels, a female character sews her vulva shut (don’t ask), and we get little to no explanation about what happens to, say, her period. Sometimes, “Wicked” feels so deeply problematic that I hesitate to recommend it to anyone — and yet, I keep going back to it myself.

The easy way to answer why I love “Wicked” is to point out its good parts. There’s a beautiful sequence in the book’s second section about Elphaba and Glinda’s circle of college friends, whom fans have dubbed the Charmed Circle, that gives dark academia vibes in the best way. The four-book cycle — particularly the sequel and my personal favorite in the series, “Son of a Witch” — explores compelling themes about religion and colonialism that the musical seems to have been afraid to touch. And for the Gelphies out there — yes, the book, unlike the musical, is in fact canonically gay.

But honestly, all of this is incidental to my personal love for the “Wicked” book, which I suspect actually comes from the fact that it brings me the same kind of comfort as the musical does. It seems counterintuitive to say that a 500-page novel about the violent suppression of political revolution can be a comfort book. But it makes sense to me, albeit in a roundabout way — because both versions of “Wicked” are, at their hearts, built on an American fairytale.

Fairytale retellings get things wrong a lot of the time. I’m a bit of a retelling nerd, and what I hate most is when a retelling clearly lacks respect for its source material. (“Peter Pan” retellings are particularly bad offenders, which I blame entirely on Season 3A of “Once Upon a Time.”) But in my opinion, Maguire’s “Wicked,” despite its adult content, isn’t dark or sexual just to be an edgy corruption of “The Wizard of Oz.” You could even argue that Maguire’s Oz creates a new American fairytale — one that, like America at the time the book was written, is plagued by foreign wars, religious evangelism, and charlatan political leaders hiding in the shadows. But more importantly — to me, at least — the Oz of the “Wicked” franchise is just as much a fairytale world as the “The Wizard of Oz,” comforting in its folkloric familiarity.

All this is to say: Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” is one of my favorite books, and I don’t think you should read it. But this is a call to embrace your problematic faves, the stories that comfort you despite their flaws, the media that you genuinely believe is a masterpiece but would never recommend to a friend. Even if it leaves you feeling a little wicked.

—Outgoing Books Executive and incoming Editor-at-Large Samantha H. Chung welcomes offers to consult on a book-accurate, non-musical “Wicked” adaptation at samantha.chung@thecrimson.com. She will be sharing unsolicited opinions on the “Wicked” movies on X at @samhchung.