I'm just Mad about Harry: A Rant

The release of Deathly Hallows is less than a week away, and with the parties and stratospheric profits at Scholastic comes my least favorite part of the season: the "How Harry Potter is Ruining Our Culture" article. Today's rant comes courtesy of Ron Charles' Op-Ed in today's Washington Post, which you can read here. Go on, read it for yourself, so I can take it apart point-by point for you.

This article follows the format I've come to know and love since 1998: 1) the Harry Potter books are not well-written; 2) there's tons of fantastic British fantasy out there and Harry doesn't lead enough readers to it; 3) statistics show a consistent decline in the reading of novels by adults, and Harry isn't helping.

(It mercifully skips my favorite complaint, "the Harry Potter books are sexist because Harry is a boy", but adds in "reading Harry Potter is making adults into children who can't think for themselves." The author makes a snide comment about grown-ups "horning in on our kids' favorite books". I've made this point already, but I'll say it again: it is your job as a parent to horn in on your kids' favorite books. It's part of getting to know your kids.)

I'll get point three out of the way first, and I'll ask you to make sure you're sitting down as I do. Ready? Right then, here goes: Who cares if people don't read novels? (*Ducks under desk to avoid flying objects*) Okay, clearly I do, because my friends and I write them and I'd like that to be an economically viable profession. But honestly, no one is suffering a deficit of fiction or stories, thanks to this handy little moving-picture machine we all have in our homes.

The point of fiction, as I see it, is to allow its consumer to think about truth outside of facts: to have a chance to experience events outside of our own lives, and to see ideas through perspectives other than our own, through the imaginative stories of other people. I know, reality programming is taking over the world, too. But despite the lack of new sitcom and drama programming from the networks, most of what they've already made is still available in syndication. Thanks to cable and Netflix, I can, if I wish, keep up my lifelong addiction to stories without ever cracking a book. Not that I would want to. But I could.

Point 2: the author of the piece states that:
"The vast majority of adults who tell me they love Harry Potter never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish. And what about the dozens of other brilliant fantasy authors who could take them places that little Harry never dreamed of?"

Well, it may be true that the majority of Harry readers will stop there. But a minority of Harry readers is still millions upon millions of people, and how many of them did go on to read Clarke or Pullman, or Lewis or Tolkein, or Wynne-Jones or Larbalestier? I've personally hand-sold great books to parents looking for stuff their Harry-reading kids will like next, and I don't even work in a bookstore. And going back to the economics of novel-writing, how much of recent children's and YA fantasy would never even have gotten past acquisitions, if Harry hadn't made the whole genre commercially viable again?

Maybe I'm reading in too much, but somewhere in this complaint I see a wistfullness--that Harry Potter didn't change the world enough. It gets everybody excited about a book the way we're used to getting about a movie opening or TV series finale, it appeals to people who don't usually read at all, and yet the series is considered a failure because it doesn't magically convince reluctant readers to abandon their TV sets for the joys of the written word. Good grief.

I'm not even going to bother disputing Point 1. Think, if you want, that the Harry books are characterized by "the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes", I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But for pete's sake, nobody's forcing you to read it if you don't want to. Go back to your literature.

And in the name of all I cherish, stop trying to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

--Kathryne