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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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from: Dan Kois
to: Will Leitch, Brad Meltzer, and Polly Shulman

SPOILER! The Spin-Off TV Show?

Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007, at 6:19 PM ET

Caution: This entire Book Club contains spoilers.

Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.

Will, you're not alone in your distaste for endings that focus on cozy domesticity. "Fray" poster jack_cerf points out Orwell's comment on Dickens' happy endings: "This is the type of the Victorian happy ending—a vision of a huge, loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it implies."

And Frayster AaronD echoes other posters by arguing—fairly convincingly, I think—that in the long run what matters about this book is not our opinions but the opinions of children who read the book: "There are a bunch of logical, well-reasoned arguments on this site for why the book may be a disappointment. Not a single one of these arguments stands up to the rebuttal: Imagine being 12 and reading this book." I freely admit that 12-year-old me would have thought this was about the greatest book ever written.

Does that disqualify us from treating the book as an object of criticism somewhat above its age bracket? Not at all! But it does remind me that my hours reading the book—spent mostly sitting on a blanket in a sun-dappled park in my neighborhood—were delightful ones completely free of any of the criticism that the book inspired after the fact. Despite all my griping, I'm grateful to J.K. Rowling for writing a book that's so spellbinding for so jaded a reader.

Polly, you say you hope that J.K. Rowling's next project will be short, funny, and in the spirit of the earliest books in the series. I must confess that Deathly Hallows' epilogue didn't feel like the definitive end point that so many others see it as, and that Rowling by her own admission hoped it would be. Perhaps it's blasphemy to even suggest it, but didn't the epilogue read to you as a perfect seven-page treatment for the pilot of Hogwarts: The Next Generation, airing at 5:30 weekdays on The N? Think of it! Short, silly half-hour stories, set among students preoccupied not by the specter of unthinkable evil but by the more daunting prospects of homework, cliques, and navigating their way through adolescence. Harry and Ron and Hermione could show up only for Very Special Episodes, as their kids have the happy, peaceable childhoods Voldemort denied them. I know I'd watch!

We're welcoming to our discussion novelist and comics writer Brad Meltzer, who in his career has had to tackle the daunting prospect of writing stories—and endings—for such beloved characters as Superman, Batman, and the whole DC comics universe. He's soon to tackle a character that feels (to me, anyway) at least as canonical as Harry Potter: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as he writes for Dark Horse's new Buffy: Season Eight comic books. Brad, how scary is it to write characters who have become so well-known as to have a life of their own? How hard is it to kill off characters in whom fans have become deeply invested? And has fan response ever convinced you that a decision you made about a well-loved character was the wrong one?

Dan

the book club
entries

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

from: Dan Kois
to: Will Leitch, Brad Meltzer, and Polly Shulman

SPOILER! The Spin-Off TV Show?

Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007, at 6:19 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 Editor:

If you're spoiler shy... If you're following Harry Potter discussions... If you haven't yet finished the book... If you're experiencing all three of these conditions, yet you're reading this article... Then you, my friend, are a foolhardy reader.

There seem to be a lot of foolhardy readers out there.

If you're afraid of spoilers close your eyes. Close this page. Don't enter the Fray. Open your book and get finished already, so that you can join this discussion. Spoilers follow below. The Fray overfills with 'em.—G.A.

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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