Wicked: B+

What drove the Wicked Witch of the West? What motivated her to wear those horrendous black skirts? Why did she train a legion of animal followers to do her bidding? Why was she the sole green woman in a land of midgets? And why was she so deathly allergic to water? These are some of the central questions kicked around by author Gregory Maguire in his grandly allegorical, philisophically murky Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. In Wicked the future "fiend" is born as Elphaba in a quiet town located squarely in the province of Munchkinland to a zealot father and a morally unscrupulous mother. She is green and her features are sharp, angular, and as fearsome as a pair of scissors. Oddly enough her birth almost exactly coincides with the ascendence of the Glorious Wizard down into the Emerald City - the capital of Oz, her home.

And if this sounds all alittle quiet, rote even, things get pumping in quick fashion. It turns out the Wizard isn't a kindly, bumbling, old man (a la the '39 movie version); instead he is a politically wily despot who, flying down from the sky on his famous red hot-air balloon, quickly stirs up a coup and takes the reigns from the Ozma Regent and his ruling family. Such a shocker! But having changed an iconic figure of quirky modesty and goodness into a tyrant is only the first of Maguire's tricks: he also completely re-imagines the world into which the Wizard arrives. His characters traverse all four of the major Oz provinces (from Gillikin, the rich North, to The Vinkus, the arid West) and along the way the reader is privy to the many vivid imaginings he instills in these lands. More than that he laces his entire work with a gidy cynicism and black humor. Together these two elements form a nifty little elixir of an idea (swirled together from creativity and wit) that has propulsive effect: one finds it difficult to stop reading and reading, curious to see his next inspired revisionist twist.

Anticipation proves a killer however. As the plot kicks into high gear - from Elphaba's days as an activist college student to her days of political exile to her murder - Wicked runs alittle rampant. First off, the author loses sight of his characters, specifically the larger ones. As the chief example of such oversight, our newly discovered heroine also suffers the worst; she leaps from tartly anti-social to malicious to benevolent to submissive and back again in the span of these 400-pages. It's a lurching transition every time. Furthermore her friends seem just as foggy: Avaric, the handsome snob, is a "perfect asshole" until he carries on a genial debate with the Witch near the end of the book while Glinda the Good Witch goes from shallow and likeable to merely shallow (is she a pawn? is she ignorant? does anyone care? hello?).

Lacking strong character foundations, the entire point of Maguire's story (to delve into what made the Wicked Witch "wicked") gets lost in all of his noise. The noise though is almost worth the show. Drenched in homoeroticism, skewered with irony, and set aflame over the roasting coals of giddy toxic sarcasm, the prose of Wicked seethes with tons of combustible, compulsive humor and black-hearted delight. It's a good thing too, since as a main attraction the plot serves up aces until it sputters out at the end with a clenchingly un-satisfying final few pages. I guess the jokes on Maguire then for having engaged himself and the reader on the issue of trancendentalism, the search for a soul, the root of evil, "evil" and history since he can't seem to keep steady with any serious pondering (or, gasp!, ephiphany).

Let's stop for a moment though and consider something interesting but difficult to spot: the fact that Gregory Maguire is actually a pretty proficient word smith, especially late in the book. He toys around with a metaphorical examination of the creation of icicles, spends pages on the architectural stylings of Oz-cities, and has a canny physical curiousity for his creations. As writers go, let's not go so far as to say that all there is to the author of Wicked is a neat-o-keen creativte streak but to think there's a whole lot residing under his crackling send-up would be a misreprensentation; lacking truly rounded personalities to people his pages with and a sorely needed idea of thematic closure, the novel leaves you with a mere vestige of depth...but it, as Maguire himself might say, is something.