A National Lampoon spoof of the "Hardy Boys" series, The Mystery of the Ghost Writer, manages to get in a few good digs at critical darlings at the expense of bad kiddie lit. I find this timely and appropriate because it reminds me of the recent A.S. Byatt commentary in the New York Times, "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult," wherein she alleged that Potter appeals to those "whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, 'only personal.' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family." This seems like a pretty facile reading of the books, but it prompted Caleb Carr to write in support of her (guess there's no roaring demand for a follow-up to his treatise on war) and goaded Charles Taylor of Salon to write "A.S. Byatt and the goblet of bile," which, while not having the most original title ever, does go on to make the point that maybe Byatt might be taking the role of priestess at the temple of literary culture a little too seriously. This is silly, as everyone knows that's Harold Bloom's job, although in the Atlantic Monthly's "Ranting Against Cant," he does reiterate, "But of course, the Harry Potter series is rubbish. Like all rubbish, it will eventually be rubbed down. Time will obliterate it. What can one say?"
Well, one could say one was wrong, but that would require us all to stick around for a few more hundred years to see if this is the case. (Note to self: find original WSJ piece Bloom wrote. Got it! Thank you, college curriculum website.) I'd rather that people tackled one of two ideas, neither of which seem to be addressed here: why are adults so irritated by the whole grownups-reading-Harry-Potter thing? And could it be tied into a persistent conviction (aired beautifully in the Atlantic Monthly's "A Reader's Manifesto" two years ago) that a lot of adult fiction isn't terribly entertaining? Although Harold Bloom asks in his piece, "Why read, if what you read will not enrich mind or spirit or personality?" he doesn't seem to regard any answer as being remotely possible or valid, which betrays his entire argument; not being able to acknowledge the act of reading for escapist pleasure or comfort, he can't refute it. Stephen King -- who takes some knocking in the Bloom piece, and who's given glowing reviews to both Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ( for the New York Times) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (for Entertainment Weekly) actually generates a sly little coda to the Reader's Manifesto in the July 2003 Book magazine with "America the Literate."
Any way, is this whole "thinking adults don't read J. K. Rowling!" thing a form of passive-aggressive backlash against the whole Harry Potter phenom? Yeah, the press ran amok. But if you object to the inordinate amount of attention paid to a children's book, wouldn't a more effective form of protest be not writing about Harry Potter at all? Or doing like The Onion did and running, "Children, Creepy Middle-Aged Weirdos Swept Up In Harry Potter Craze."
To get back to my original point, the Lampoon piece puts me in mind of the Atlantic Monthly article: people would sometimes rather read entertaining mainstream fluff than critically-praised darlings, and apparently, that's a point nobody feels like making whenever addressing the grownups-reading-Harry-Potter thing.
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