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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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from: Will Leitch
to: Dan Kois and Polly Shulman

SPOILER! How Is the Final Book Like a Sitcom?

Updated Wednesday, July 25, 2007, at 3:58 PM ET

Caution: This entire Book Club contains spoilers.

Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.

Dear Dan and Polly,

Ah, yes: the epilogue. Time for more gripes.

I understand that Rowling—who has had two children in the last four years—is all about the tiny rug rats these days. But to reduce this epic series, full of chaos and destiny and choices made in an instant that affect future generations, to a family sitcom—According to Harry? <shudder>—seems like a monumental waste. I was less bothered by the absence of some supporting characters than I was by the vanillafication of the characters we've come to love and respect. I mean no offense to suburban parents when I say this, but: Did we really go through all this just to see Harry, Ron, and Hermione take up residence on a cul-de-sac?

Rowling could have taken a number of more interesting directions, but let's start with the one you suggest, Dan: What does everybody do for a living? Would Harry be an Auror or a professor or just some washed-up celebrity who hawks used brooms? (Think of him like a retired athlete, to the wizard world what John Elway is to Denver.) I've always thought Hermione would make a fascinating minister of magic; here she seems like a Quidditch mom. It doesn't feel like Rowling elected not to answer these questions; it feels like she didn't even think to ask them. The general message of the epilogue seems to be: Your skills as a warrior against the Dark Lord are best used in escorting your children to school.

Which reminds me of another sad omission: Some of my favorite sections in earlier books described how the wizard world occasionally seeps into the Muggle world. Remember when the Tony Blair-esque British prime minister was visited by a mysterious wizard who warned of magical threats to humans? (That was during the stretch when Rowling dabbled in political commentary.) In this book, Kingsley Shacklebolt briefly consults with another Muggle prime minister. But on the whole, the humans are left out of the fun. (I did enjoy the brief warm moment for Dudley Dursley, who reminds me of about half the guys I went to high school with.) I always wished Rowling would work more human-wizard interaction into the series; surely, some half-blood Hogwarts student's parents would have leaked Hogwarts' existence to a Rupert Murdoch rag.

MAGIC KID SEZ: "THEY TURNED ME INTO A TOAD!"

You can't tell me Rita Skeeter wouldn't be hired in a second. She would have done wonders with Princess Di.

Anyway, the epilogue really did depress me a bit, and not just because it seems to slam the door on a sequel (unless, of course, that sequel chronicles 19 years of upwardly mobile wizards gentrifying Hogsmeade). It's one thing to read "And They All Lived Happily Ever After." It's another to see it in such bland detail. Apparently, living happily ever after means nothing exciting happening for 19 years. Surely, some sort of crisis occurred. It couldn't have just been two decades of suburban bliss, right? Otherwise, I suppose we should be pleased we missed Volume 8, Harry Potter and the Soggy Bloomin' Onion.

Yours in urban decay,
Will

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

from: Will Leitch
to: Dan Kois and Polly Shulman

SPOILER! How Is the Final Book Like a Sitcom?

Updated Wednesday, July 25, 2007, at 3:58 PM ET

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This is Slate's fourth Harry Potter Book Club. In 1999, Polly Shulman and A.O. Scott discussed the merits of reading the first three books as grownups; in 2001, Judith Shulevitz and Jodi Kantor examined issues of morality in the fourth book; and in 2003, Shulman and David Edelstein took on the mammoth-sized fifth installation. The books also have provided ample opportunity for allegorical interpretation: Jesse Cohen found parallels between Lord Voldemort and Margaret Thatcher, and Julia Turner wondered if the wizard warfare reflects the war on terror. Spoiler alert! The last book could end like this.

Dan Kois has worked as a film executive and a literary agent. He writes and edits New York magazine's arts and culture blog, Vulture. Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin.com and the author of the young adult novel Catch. Brad Meltzer, a novelist and comics writer, is the author of The Book of Fate. Polly Shulman is the author of Enthusiasm, a novel for young adults.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

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Remarks from the Fray:

I find it odd that people seem disappointed that 19 years down the road the characters lead seemingly humdrum lives, about which we don't hear much. [That's] just the point.

Folks, most people don't aspire to be under constant threat of death - mostly people want to live happy, relatively uneventful lives. They want to live in a house they love, do work they enjoy, raise kids, be comfortable. The fact that killing Voldemort allowed this to happen is, I think, poignant - Harry was never comfortable as the Boy Who Lived, and now he can finally get away from it. Maybe as readers we want excitement and adventure and really wild things on the page, but by not making Harry et al want these things, Rowling is respecting the characters she created.

On a certain level, I find it a profound commentary on what most people want out of life - not fame or fortune or power, but love and happiness. Odd that so many readers don't seem to see that.

--brennan

(To reply, click here.)

The continued short shrift that Harry gives Hermione is incredibly frustrating in this book, more than in any other. Perhaps Rowling's one effort to comment on this is when she complains about having to do all the cooking - which is not only immediately dismissed, but also like, come on! The one thing Hermione is going to complain about is something so easily dismissed by the unsympathetic reader as an 'age old' feminist complaint. How about the fact that Hermione does everything and never gets a shred of the credit, other than some astonished expressions and the occasional "Mione that's amazing!"

She is consistently the character who saves Harry's ass and I continue to be frustrated that in the last book Rowling does nothing to really acknowledge or challenge this within her book - it is not just enough to assume that readers who like Hermione are going to get it, especially when Harry remains on such a pedestal, or that the lack of thoroughgoing challenge to Harry and Ron's behavior will be picked up on by readers with feminist sympathies, especially when most readers do not share such sympathies! It is especially important to be challenging this, I think, in a children's book.

It is not really believable that Hermione wouldn't challenge Harry more when she so relentlessly stands up for those who are denied rights, equality, and dignity. Maybe it's that other tendency on her part (or Rowling's?) to view her guy(s) as the only ones who are not sexist - they're my best friends, how can they be sexist? etc

Does Rowling's overall failure to inject a feminist critique into Harry Potter reflect her desire to prevent the boys from having to engage in some serious self-critique, a caving in to popular dislike of feminism, or her own discomfort with feminism?

--heypop

(To reply, click here.)

The Problem with the final Harry Potter book is lack of sex. In books 5-6 the students at Hogwarts slowly start to come to terms with their maturing attitudes to the opposite sex. Rowling deftly negotiates the concerns and fears of adolescence as they begin to date, and finally "snog". Throughout book 6 Rowling has various students, including Ron, Harry, and Ginny snogging constantly as they realize their emerging desires.

In book 7 Rowling starts with a great scene showing Harry's awkward attitude towards himself, his body, and his friends. "He felt like asking them to show a little more respect for his privacy as they all began stripping off with impunity, clearly much more at ease with his body then they would have been with their own." This one line gives much insight into the mindset of a 17 year old and allows Harry and his friends to seem believable.

When you contrast that with the 3 teens spending months living together in a forest, with no one supervising, and no one else to disturb them and yet there's no real awkwardness or tension ever described, you begin wonder why Rowling took her characters and replaced them with figurines. By the time Rowling has the plot moving she's turned each of them into an extreme example of their singular character traits. Never is it more apparent then when each wishes for their favorite Deathly Hallow.

Had she bothered making her characters continuously feel real, she could have actually written an interesting finale to the book...rather than a plot-driven bore upheld by at least half a dozen deux ex machina moments.

--Joschenker

(To reply, click here.)

(7/25)

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