JK Rowling has had a lot of commercial success with the Harry Potter series, and also has written a couple books after that, e.g. the ones under the pen name of Robert Galbraith.
I read the first book of Robert Galbraith and am now reading the Silkworm. Not bad storytelling, but I’m always wondering what the literary world (and literary Dopers) think of her.
Harold Bloom was not a fan.
I would think the literary world would have a very positive view of an author who got young people to read books–instead of the pervasive video and online activities they spend most of their time with.
An offshoot of the literary world–literary SF authors–also have some haters, including Ursula Le Guin:
and China Mieville:
(I know I’ve seen harsher criticism from Mieville elsewhere, but I’m having trouble digging it up).
These are, of course, the leaders if leaders there be of the uber-left SF movement. Take that for what it’s worth.
Sometimes I wonder if hugely popular books like HP suffer from a critical backlash. I like plenty of Le Guin’s books but I don’t consider them any more imaginative than HP.
Really? There’s more invention in *A Wizard of Earthsea * alone than the entire Harry Potter series IMHO.
It’s hard to imagine what else they could say. YA books are not intended to be deep literature and I don’t know of many examples that are. The younger the audience, the harder to do anything resembling literature. The earlier Potter books are cliched variations of the standard British horrible school experience aimed at a very young audience. They are not brilliantly written or penetratingly psychological. They are fun and not supposed to be much more. I only made it to book four, but apparently they get aimed at older audiences as the series goes on and the writing and characterization gets better as Rowling gains experience. (Though she also got too big to edit and I hear the last volumes are horribly bloated.)
That they get kids to read is nice. Well, it’s wonderful, but it’s absolutely irrelevant to the literary value of the books. Kids will read what’s fun, whether it’s trash or treasure.
Have any of you read the “Robert Galbraith” books, which are not YA? Any opinions on them?
I’m not seeing hate in the criticisms. I’m seeing literary people saying, basically, that the books aren’t literary. Which they aren’t.
I enjoyed the books, but did not do so for their literary inventiveness. I’d switch “good fare for its age group” to “good fare for its audience”, because I don’t expect all adults to be literary, but I don’t mistake the books for anything but a good easy read. They don’t have to be more.
I think it’s worth quoting a bit more of the context:
Whatever Harry Potter’s virtues—and it definitely does have them—“incredible originality” is not one of them, so to promote it on that basis, especially to someone who wrote a classic fantasy involving a school for wizards decades before Rowling did, is to invite scorn.
You heard right.
I’ve seen people who think literary fiction as being really important having trouble with those who have no desire to write literary fiction.
The very young characters in the first book cared about things young characters would care about - house standings and relatively simple rescues. The problems they faced grew as they aged which is not a bad strategy. And the world was made accessible so that young kids could see themselves being drawn into it.
If one wanted to be nasty they could say that Left Hand of Darkness was just a journey story set on another planet. It’s obviously a lot more than that, but you can always find the basic plots if that is what you care about.
While I agree that there’s not a lot of ‘literary’ in the HP books, it always struck me that a bit of the criticism was based upon, “Holy shit, that’s a lot of money.”
I read my dad’s old children’s books: Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, and Sydney Lanier’s Boy’s King Arthur, and Treasure Island, and Prince Valiant, and I loved them. But will the offspring of the Harry Potter generation like their books? That’s the real test, not the Brit Lit-chat clique. They famously always have the daggers out.
I read (actually, listened to) the first one and found it fairly ordinary: not bad, but not exceptionally good.
Well, I suppose they could avoid making concrete predictions, like this one by Bloom:
The Harry Potter epiphenomenon will go on, doubtless for some time, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, and then wane.
The article was written in 2000; just one year before Jackson’s movies.
On the contrary, there’s plenty of stuff that’s YA that’s far deeper than Harry Potter. That’s part of the frustration for me: while they’re doubtlessly fun (I read all of them and enjoyed them), watching them rocket to fame while better IMO YA books languish in obscurity is annoying. I have to remind myself that the market doesn’t always reward what I wish it would reward.
(Some better YA stuff: The Lost Conspiracy, Octavian Nothing, A Wizard of Earthsea, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, A Wrinkle in Time)
Perhaps it’s due to past literary experiences. I thought A Wizard of Earthsea good but forgettable (I had to go to Wiki to remind myself of the plot). I like A Wrinkle In Time despite the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. Both of those were read while I was reading lots of good sci-fi and fantasy and they didn’t stand out. HP came later and it’s probably the first whimsical YA I read and just seemed wonderful to me.
Sometimes it seems that critics believe it uncool to like something that was so overwhelmingly popular. We’ll see if the newest generation of critics feels the same about HP since they grew up with it.
No, but I have read The Casual Vacancy, which is not YA either.
I don’t know if it’s literary, but I tend to be of the school “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.”
Rowling understands how people operate. Her characters’ motivations and reactions feel very real to me. And I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort on her part - I’ve heard her mention Dickens a few times in interviews - she does the Dickens ironic voice well. Although third person, she sort of takes on a character’s voice for a bit, pretending to loyally present that character’s attitudes about something, in order to expose how ridiculous their ideas are.
I also like her style - both in HP and The Casual Vacancy - somehow her storytelling is very visual. I can see it in my mind much more than I can with most novels. We need the concept of a replacement novel - like a replacement player for baseball stat geeks - to measure how good a novel is. How much value above replacement does it score?
I read A Wrinkle in Time and I liked it a lot. But I was about thirteen at the time. Is it better than Potter? I couldn’t say. I read 1984 and Brave New World around the same age. I didn’t know what literature was, but I knew they were for people older than me and A Wrinkle in Time wasn’t. That’s probably why I’ve reread them and left A Wrinkle in Time on the library shelves.
Good and popular overlap, but not by a lot and only if you leave a lot of slop in the rigor of the definitions. I’m sure there are many better books that will never get even 1% of the sales and attention than the Potter books. That’s also true of all adult books in all fields. Does anybody ask what the literary world thinks about any of the books better than Harry Potter? No. That’s because almost no children’s books and damn few YA books are literature by anybody’s definition, so the literary world shouldn’t even bother to have an opinion on them. They only do so about Harry Potter because it’s a ridiculous outlier that you have to have an opinion about, just like the Kardashians. But your opinion about the Kardashians is entirely irrelevant, no matter who you are.
And who cares what Harold Bloom thinks about anything?
Alan Moore fucking hates Harry Potter, to the point of it actually being embarrassing to read. His latest book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ended with a thinly veiled Harry Potter character finding out he was the Anti-Christ and going on a magic-fuelled schoolground massacre at Hogwarts before going into hiding and whining about how hard-done by he was. I think Moore was trying to make a point about the series being reactionary and derivative, and I’m not a Harry Potter fan at all, but his version read like the work of a petulant 15 year old trying to be shocking and iconoclastic. I think I’ve given up on the series after that, it just left such a sour taste.