The Trouble with Harry

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I've got some nerve writing about Harry Potter when I've barely met the boy. I've read about a third of his first book, twice, and that's it. The first third. I keep trying to get past it, and it keeps not happening. I belong to that sparest, rarest minority in America -- people who don't enjoy Harry Potter. I don't hate him, I don't dislike him, I don't object to him on moral or philosophical or religious grounds. He simply doesn't do anything for me.

I'm not proud of it. I really expected to enjoy the HP books, darn it. I meant to. I wanted to. But it was like Juliet trying so hard to fall for Paris because it would have made her family happy. You can't force that kind of thing, you really can't. All the good intentions in the world won't ignite a spark of real passion.

At first, I thought it was just that by the time I heard about them, the books were best-sellers and I was being an elitist anti-populist pig. And it's true, I don't generally enjoy best-sellers. But I'm always ready to make an exception. Last year I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about this Bridget Jones chick, and now I've read the first book three times and the sequel twice. Helen Fielding writes like an angel (okay, more like a devil in disguise, which is a lot more fun anyway), and it's not her fault that a lot of people have figured that out.

So it's not that best-sellerdom per se will kill a book for me. One thing that did bother me about the Harry Potter books even before I'd tried them was that everyone who recommended them to me -- all right, recommend is too mild a word in reference to Potterites and their sacred texts. We need another word for the process, one slightly more spittle-intensive and quick of breath. Anyway, the excited people who kept thrusting HP at me were almost all non-readers.

Which put me on my guard, because for some reason when non-readers start reading it's almost never for a good reason. I mean, I guess any reading is a step in the right direction, but why can't they ever pick that lovely new translation of The Tale of Genji, or even an Anne Tyler novel?

I have a friend who thinks Danielle Steele is a literary goddess, and has tried repeatedly to get me to see the light. This is one of those cases when I think that non-readers reading isn't a good thing. I have tried in vain to get her to raise her literary sights. I waved Joanna Trollope and Shirley Jackson and even Bridget Jones at her, and she picked them up and put them down again because, as she put it, she wasn't used to "writing like that." You know -- the good kind.

Reading is like eating. It's hard to develop a taste for subtleties of flavor and texture when you've been brought up with frozen fish sticks and neon macaroni and cheese. The quality stuff always seems a little...off.

So, yes, I was less thrilled than I might have been when people who had previously bragged to me of making it through high school without cracking a book started wondering aloud in incredulous tones how I'd managed to stay breathing so long without the help of Harry Potter. It kind of got to me, tell the truth. Just for the record, I've been reading since I was three, okay? And I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't all great works. I'm not one of those prodigies who was reading Mann when she was seven or whatever it was, like that Susan Sontag bimbo. When I was a kid, I read kid's books. Even the classics I did read -- Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Little Women -- were kid's classics. The rest was whatever the library had in stock.

So I'm not being snooty when I say that Harry Potter doesn't float my boat. I'm not even saying his books are bad, or badly written. I'm just saying.

But I have kind of noticed that there are people who've developed just a bit of fondness for the boy. And I do like that, because I tend to get funny looks when I talk about literary characters in a way that makes it clear how important they are to me and never mind the technical detail that they don't exist in the same sense some other people do. I'm not one of those weirdos who insists that Sherlock Holmes is really, truly, flesh-and-blood alive. I'm just saying that I don't see how people like, say, Jane Eyre and Charlotte Lucas could mean more to me if they were. And it's nice, now, to be able to say, when I've gone on altogether too long or passionately about them, "Look, we all have our paper people. You've got Harry Potter, right?" And the other person will see what I'm saying without any more explanation.

So I do rather understand why a certain segment of the population would be panicked at the idea of not having him any longer. Skeptics and non-fans don't matter in this realm, but an author has literally the power of life and death over her creations. And authors have been known to wield that quite ruthlessly. Arthur Conan Doyle got so sick of writing about Sherlock Holmes that he threw him off a cliff. Charles Dickens killed Little Nell after dragging the poor thing through hundreds of pages of perils.

Of course the casualty list is much longer than that. Writers destroy their characters all the time. But these two come to mind because they were characters that had caught the public's fancy in a big way -- so much so that the public felt it ought to have some say in their fates. Conan Doyle was persuaded, for a lot of money, to bring his most famous creation back to life after the publishers got sick of listening to all the fans screaming. Dickens published The Old Curiosity Shop serially, and his readers could see which way the wind was blowing. They wrote begging him not to let Little Nell die. But Dickens was relentless -- though he did at least go ahead and kill off Quilp, too, just to make everyone feel a little better. (Except me. I always found Quilp rather attractive, in a horrifying kind of way. Never mind. Forget you read that.)

And now J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame is -- well, not threatening Harry, exactly; but refusing not to threaten him. In other words, on the question of Harry Potter surviving his own adventures, Rowling refuses to say yea or nay. To the point that she's got men like John Irving and Stephen King publicly pleading for his life.

Now, I've nothing much to report about John Irving's behavior in this respect. I don't know him, and I'm not the one who'll have to put up with him drinking more heavily than usual or sobbing into the pillow every night should Harry Potter meet an untimely demise. But I would like to say just a word or two about Stephen King jumping into this particular fray. Other than the fact that he's a fraidy-cat scaredy-pants baby-in-big-boy's-shoes, I mean.

First off, this is Stephen King we're talking about, right? The guy who wrote the novel Misery (which in turn, by the way, birthed one of the rare genuinely wonderful movies that can actually compete with their paper parents)? The novel in which a deranged fan kidnaps her favorite writer and then goes even more insane when she finds out that said favorite writer killed off her favorite character? Insane to the point that said favorite writer, minus a body part or two, was only able to prolong his own life a la Sheherazade by writing a new book just for said psycho fan in which the favorite character is miraculously brought back to life in a manner that unfortunately, thanks to a weird children's story I read in my misspent youth (based in turn, as I later learned, on a story by Edgar Allan Poe), wasn't a surprise to me? This is that Stephen King, right?

But quite aside from the whole possibility-of-veiled-threats issue -- this is also the same Stephen King who, some twenty years ago, wrote Danse Macabre? In which, on pages 296 to 297 of the paperback version, he took the opportunity of badmouthing (with the help of a generous supply of capital letters and exclamation points) readers who peek ahead to the end of a book to see how it comes out? Really bawled them out, to the point where if you can't find the page right away, you can hold the book up to your ear, listen for a minute, and then just follow the screaming?

So does he just not sweat that whole philosophical consistency thing, or what? Because -- look. There are only two reasons why a writer could get so incensed about behavior like this from a reader. The first is that readers who skip straight to the end might be readers who aren't shelling out to buy the book in the first place, since they've now learned all they need to. I somehow doubt that's the issue for King, since even at the time of the writing of Danse Macabre he had enough readers forking it over for his work that he could afford to buy a small country or two. (He could now easily swing one of the larger ones. Maybe his wife or a close friend should suggest this possibility to him if Harry Potter does end up taking a tumble over Reichenbach Falls. It might cheer him up, and could possibly improve the world political situation, or at least make it a lot more entertaining.)

The second reason that King might have been having a hard time staying in his chair long enough to type the aforementioned passage when he obviously wanted to run out and stab an appropriate party or two is that as a writer he takes that kind of thing personally. I mean, here he is, thinking out every detail of the plot of every novel he writes, laying it out with great care like some exquisite garden path to Hell, working his keister off to breathe some actual life into his characters, figuring out conversations and cute side plots and humorous bits, all in the belief that a novel is a journey to be taken and enjoyed rather than a destination to be reached as efficiently as possible; and then some civilian of a reader takes all that work and tosses it merrily aside like an empty Starbucks cup. "Guess we won't be needing this!" he cries brightly, skipping away just in time to miss the author shooting himself.

I can understand all that. Really, I can. What I can't understand is how trying to grab a writer's hand and force it to go one way instead of another is that much different. In both cases, you're saying that you're interested primarily in the outcome, to the point that you really don't give a lark's wing what the writer might have been planning all these years. How is writing the ending yourself any different from skipping ahead to it? The outcome is essentially the same.

I have to admit that hearing about King and company getting all fretful about Harry Potter's possible death would be enough to make me almost hope that Rowling does have something fatal in mind for him, since there's nothing I like better than seeing a grown man cry. Just ask my husband. But more than the mischief of it, I would be deeply impressed if Rowling stuck to her guns on this point -- if, of course, it's what she had in mind in the first place.

Because Rowling has made it very clear that she loves Harry Potter. She loves him enough even to be exasperated with him at times. She loves him enough to have made him a person -- a human being, rather than one of those pictures of perfection discriminating readers rightly despise. He's a real boy, not Little Lord Fauntleroy. That's why he's captured so many hearts, including Rowling's own. She's genuinely attached to him, and surely it would be a wrench to her to see anything terrible happen to him.

Which is exactly why she would earn my admiration by killing him off -- if she does it from a belief that doing so would make a better book than letting him live would. Any writer who pledges allegiance first and foremost to the story being the best it can be, rather than to her own comfort level or the happiness of her fans, is a great writer. Maybe not capital-G, destined-to-be-remembered-through-the-echoing-corridors-of-time great; but noble. Admirable.

Somebody I'd take another shot at reading, even.

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