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Multivolume fantasy series are a commitment -- of time, of attention, and (not least) of patience. To sustain a reader's devotion to a series whose page-count numbers in the thousands and whose publishing schedule might span the birth of children, a book must not be merely good. It must be extraordinary. Approaching their double-digit ordinal installment, otherwise admirable series such as Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen and Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time suffer an attrition of readership when -- having attained such a voluminous complexity that the loyal reader must review preceding novels to recall the narrative -- fans just give up.

Last year, many readers were invited to an if not never-ending banquet then at least a hearty three-course meal of a trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles by debut novelist Patrick Rothfuss. Critics lauded the first book, The Name of the Wind, as "intricate and wondrous," the work of "a new giant," and even "the best fantasy novel of the past 10 years." The latter encomium seems willfully disputatious, given recent outstanding inventions such as K.J. Bishop's The Etched City, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy, as well as ongoing works by Robin Hobb and George R.R. Martin. Nonetheless, the work is an achievement, especially from a first-time writer. The true measure of its worth, however, lies in the promise of things yet to come from Rothfuss, a budding journeyman with the potential of becoming a master storyteller.

At the center of the trilogy stands Kvothe. At different times an orphan, a lutist, a student, a mage, and a dragon slayer, at the opening of his tale Kvothe is only Kote, a simple innkeeper who has renounced his adventurous ways and heroic persona. Rothfuss shows us, in a prologue that is about as perfectly polished as one page of prose can get, the layered silence that envelops him, "the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die." There are demons -- monsters equal parts spider, lobster, and Edward Scissorhands -- about and, unsurprisingly, it appears Kvothe's past is catching up with him. A scrivener tracks him down to take his life story. Kvothe demands three days - one for each book - as opposed to 101 nights to tell his tale. Then he begins the story of his life of which (unlike that indecisive narrator David Copperfield) he knows he is the hero.

Kvothe's exploits begin promisingly enough as a child prodigy of the "Ruh," itinerant performers marrying the infamy of gypsies with the talent of the theater troupe from Hamlet. Problematically, the nameless world these characters inhabit creaks with the Potemkin Village verisimilitude of an off-the-rack medieval Western European fantasy. Unexplained anachronisms intermittently pop up. In a pre-scientific culture, one wonders how a physician could subscribe not only to the precaution of washing hands but also to the concept of microscopic germs. Likewise, the author introduces a distinction between alchemy and chemistry that he never elaborates. Thus, Publishers Weekly hits the mark in observing that the novel's "originality... lies less in its unnamed imaginary world than in its precise execution."

Rothfuss eschews world building for character focus, a defensible strategy if you have an appealing character. Unfortunately, Kvothe is too good, suffering from the Superman syndrome: the flaw of flawlessness. He starts out as a boy genius with all the charm of Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As an innkeeper in his mid-twenties he has grown, but only into an echo of a David Gemmell character, wont to utter such ponderous epigrams as "Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever" and "I've told... hard lies and harder truths." Elsewhere, the careful reader will be sure to find Kvothe dropping lapidary gems, such as when (commenting on conflicting feelings) he enlightens: "Emotions by their very nature are not reasonable things." And then there is his repartee with other characters, evinced by the exchange:

"Not many people know that play."

"I am not many people."

Dustin Kenall is a lawyer working and blogging in DC. Accordingly, if at any given moment he's not reading or writing, it's probably because he's unconscious. His blog, readslikealawyer.blogspot.com, is always wide awake, though.