J K Rowling and the Cauldron of Critics
Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 12:45 am
J K. Rowling and the Cauldron of Criticism: An essay
The last Harry Potter book is almost out—and so are the critics’ knives, such as this blog denouncing Rowling for “toxic” prose, following in the footsteps of A S Byatt who in 2003 declared adults who read the Potterverse as having “stunted imaginations.”
Oh come on.
I can sypathize the impulse, given the juggernaut of Potterpalooza, to want to take Rowling down a notch or two. But the psychology of the critics is one of displacement. Although the attacks all begin on Rowling, her prose, characters, and plots, sooner or later it veers, sputtering venom, onto the true source of their ire: these books, and certainly not some struggling underemployed single mum from Edinburgh who never attended a proper writer’s workshop, don’t deserve to be so popular, and it’s just so unfair that Potter is so popular.
I read the Potter books. In fact, my wife and I read them aloud to each other, as we have many other series. (I also read a huge and varied list of other books, from high literature on down. So there. Nyaah.) I also am a writer and so I am keenly interested in what Rowling does and does not do write.
So let’s dispense with hysteria for the moment and take a serious look at Rowling.
She is not a great prose stylist. Reading Rowling aloud makes this clear. Her sentences ofter suffer from adverb poisoning; she frequently violates the dictum “show don’t tell,” or does both show and tell, not trusting the reader to get it. Frankly, she makes a lot of “beginner” mistakes, such as in the early books she frequently had characters “hiss” sentences without any silibants. Until, that is, the actor Stephen Fry, who read the British version of the audiobooks, gently took her to task for this. Rowling immediately took the hint in her future books.
Which leads me to what I think the real problem is. Rowling is not being edited. She’s the goose laying golden eggs for her publisher, her editor, and her agent, and I suspect they are too scared to give her significant feedback.
This is a more general problem—editors don’t edit anymore. Behind many great writers were great editors, shaping the work and slicing off the fat. One of the most famous was Maxwell Perkins who worked with Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and Thomas Wolfe. There are no Maxwell Perkins today. And what Rowling really needs is hard advice, such as, Kill your adverbs, darling, and, This book is about two, maybe three hunded pages too long.
The critics also are shocked, shocked to discover a bestselling author who is not a great prose stylist. Uh-huh. When I was in college, twenty plus years ago, I earned spending money writing book reviews for the university paper. A huge fraction of the bestsellers were really badly written. In fact, many of them were significantly worse writers than Rowling. Jeffrey Archer. Paul Erdman. Andrew Greeley. Clive Cussler. They were so bad I can’t remember anything about them except that they stank.
And it’s still true today, both in adult and children’s fiction. Consider Lemony Snicket, which my wife and I also read aloud: the books are so full of bad syntax as to make Rowling look like Proust.
Which leads me to what Rowling is doing right. Too often critics approach successful books with a prescriptive lens: this or this is how a bestselling book ought to be written, as if it were part of a syllabus. Instead I think it is more instructive to be descriptive: why is Harry Potter so successful? What about the books appeal to us?
First, Rowling writes vivid characters. I don’t mean to debate whether you think Harry and pals are good moral exemplars or prats, they stick in the mind. Some even surprise us. Neville Longbottom has moved from being the butt (sorry) of a joke to a tragic, sorrowful character. Dolores Umbridge is the most memorable example of the banality of evil I have read in a long time. And although some of the characters are one-note, that is not much different from the one-note but vivid characters in “literary” fiction—Rushdie’s Booker-winning Midnight’s Children comes to mind.
And I think many adults read Rowling and other young adult fiction because they are rediscovering narrative. The first four books in particular crackle with plot—the last two have drowned somewhat in the arc the final showdown. This shares in common with other “young adult” writers. Phillip Pullman is a better writer, sentence by sentence, than Rowling, but what stays with you are not his chiseled phrases but the characters of Lyra Silvertongue, Iorek the armored bear, and his vast, grand narrative.
Don’t forget that other “great” writers have their faults as well. A standard convention in American “literary” novels is to write about neurotic, self-absorbed twits you couldn’t work up tears for if they were run over by a bus—for example A S Byatt’s Possession. Or any book written by John Updike. And Henry James.
You could go on. Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels, but it has vast sections languish in the doldrums where Melville murmurs endlessly about maritime minutiae. Dickens is full of unbelievably absurd coincidences and people acting like utter idiots. Shakespeare, my God, Shakespeare is Dickens cubed. Genre books are no different: C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books were constructed with great slapdash. Tolkien’s prose, particularly his dialog, is frequently so wooden you could get splinters from it. Asimov’s dialog is even worse. The Sherlock Holmes stories have some of the hokiest plots in the English-speaking world—just how many criminals with wooden legs are there?
And these are books I love.
No book is perfect. The best novels have some flaw. Popular novels generally have something that works well. I remember reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. His prose was clunky, his dialog stiff, his characters cardboard—but he, like Rowling, cooked up a compelling narrative that was difficult to put down.
As a writer I pay attention to what annoys me in Rowling—and what works. In my own writing I have moved away from the earnest but boring character to more sharply drawn and memorable characters. I have banged away at my usual dreamy, amorphous plots, working to put in the little hints and red herrings Rowling is so fond of, and discovered new and powerful metaphors that make my work better. I don’t take Rowling as my model, but neither will I cast stones needlessly. (And as far as I can tell, Rowling is far less full of herself than many authors—see, for example, Byatt.) And when the book is delivered on Saturday, I’m turning off the computer and the TV and the radio in order to rediscover the joy of the journey of narrative.
The last Harry Potter book is almost out—and so are the critics’ knives, such as this blog denouncing Rowling for “toxic” prose, following in the footsteps of A S Byatt who in 2003 declared adults who read the Potterverse as having “stunted imaginations.”
Oh come on.
I can sypathize the impulse, given the juggernaut of Potterpalooza, to want to take Rowling down a notch or two. But the psychology of the critics is one of displacement. Although the attacks all begin on Rowling, her prose, characters, and plots, sooner or later it veers, sputtering venom, onto the true source of their ire: these books, and certainly not some struggling underemployed single mum from Edinburgh who never attended a proper writer’s workshop, don’t deserve to be so popular, and it’s just so unfair that Potter is so popular.
I read the Potter books. In fact, my wife and I read them aloud to each other, as we have many other series. (I also read a huge and varied list of other books, from high literature on down. So there. Nyaah.) I also am a writer and so I am keenly interested in what Rowling does and does not do write.
So let’s dispense with hysteria for the moment and take a serious look at Rowling.
She is not a great prose stylist. Reading Rowling aloud makes this clear. Her sentences ofter suffer from adverb poisoning; she frequently violates the dictum “show don’t tell,” or does both show and tell, not trusting the reader to get it. Frankly, she makes a lot of “beginner” mistakes, such as in the early books she frequently had characters “hiss” sentences without any silibants. Until, that is, the actor Stephen Fry, who read the British version of the audiobooks, gently took her to task for this. Rowling immediately took the hint in her future books.
Which leads me to what I think the real problem is. Rowling is not being edited. She’s the goose laying golden eggs for her publisher, her editor, and her agent, and I suspect they are too scared to give her significant feedback.
This is a more general problem—editors don’t edit anymore. Behind many great writers were great editors, shaping the work and slicing off the fat. One of the most famous was Maxwell Perkins who worked with Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and Thomas Wolfe. There are no Maxwell Perkins today. And what Rowling really needs is hard advice, such as, Kill your adverbs, darling, and, This book is about two, maybe three hunded pages too long.
The critics also are shocked, shocked to discover a bestselling author who is not a great prose stylist. Uh-huh. When I was in college, twenty plus years ago, I earned spending money writing book reviews for the university paper. A huge fraction of the bestsellers were really badly written. In fact, many of them were significantly worse writers than Rowling. Jeffrey Archer. Paul Erdman. Andrew Greeley. Clive Cussler. They were so bad I can’t remember anything about them except that they stank.
And it’s still true today, both in adult and children’s fiction. Consider Lemony Snicket, which my wife and I also read aloud: the books are so full of bad syntax as to make Rowling look like Proust.
Which leads me to what Rowling is doing right. Too often critics approach successful books with a prescriptive lens: this or this is how a bestselling book ought to be written, as if it were part of a syllabus. Instead I think it is more instructive to be descriptive: why is Harry Potter so successful? What about the books appeal to us?
First, Rowling writes vivid characters. I don’t mean to debate whether you think Harry and pals are good moral exemplars or prats, they stick in the mind. Some even surprise us. Neville Longbottom has moved from being the butt (sorry) of a joke to a tragic, sorrowful character. Dolores Umbridge is the most memorable example of the banality of evil I have read in a long time. And although some of the characters are one-note, that is not much different from the one-note but vivid characters in “literary” fiction—Rushdie’s Booker-winning Midnight’s Children comes to mind.
And I think many adults read Rowling and other young adult fiction because they are rediscovering narrative. The first four books in particular crackle with plot—the last two have drowned somewhat in the arc the final showdown. This shares in common with other “young adult” writers. Phillip Pullman is a better writer, sentence by sentence, than Rowling, but what stays with you are not his chiseled phrases but the characters of Lyra Silvertongue, Iorek the armored bear, and his vast, grand narrative.
Don’t forget that other “great” writers have their faults as well. A standard convention in American “literary” novels is to write about neurotic, self-absorbed twits you couldn’t work up tears for if they were run over by a bus—for example A S Byatt’s Possession. Or any book written by John Updike. And Henry James.
You could go on. Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels, but it has vast sections languish in the doldrums where Melville murmurs endlessly about maritime minutiae. Dickens is full of unbelievably absurd coincidences and people acting like utter idiots. Shakespeare, my God, Shakespeare is Dickens cubed. Genre books are no different: C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books were constructed with great slapdash. Tolkien’s prose, particularly his dialog, is frequently so wooden you could get splinters from it. Asimov’s dialog is even worse. The Sherlock Holmes stories have some of the hokiest plots in the English-speaking world—just how many criminals with wooden legs are there?
And these are books I love.
No book is perfect. The best novels have some flaw. Popular novels generally have something that works well. I remember reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. His prose was clunky, his dialog stiff, his characters cardboard—but he, like Rowling, cooked up a compelling narrative that was difficult to put down.
As a writer I pay attention to what annoys me in Rowling—and what works. In my own writing I have moved away from the earnest but boring character to more sharply drawn and memorable characters. I have banged away at my usual dreamy, amorphous plots, working to put in the little hints and red herrings Rowling is so fond of, and discovered new and powerful metaphors that make my work better. I don’t take Rowling as my model, but neither will I cast stones needlessly. (And as far as I can tell, Rowling is far less full of herself than many authors—see, for example, Byatt.) And when the book is delivered on Saturday, I’m turning off the computer and the TV and the radio in order to rediscover the joy of the journey of narrative.
