Snob Squad in kamikaze mode

Waking to the realization that soon they won’t have J.K. Rowling to kick around anymore, the Snob Squad has gone into full kamikaze mode against Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Nicholas Lezard, for example, can’t believe he still has to explain why so much of Rowling’s prose is second-rate:

If I do, then that means you’re one of the many adults who don’t have a problem with the retreat into infantilism that your willing immersion in the Potter books represents. It doesn’t make you a bad or silly person. But if you have the patience to read it without noticing how plodding it is, then you are self-evidently someone on whom the possibilities of the English language are largely lost.

This is the kind of prose that reasonably intelligent nine-year-olds consider pretty hot stuff, if they’re producing it themselves; for a highly-educated woman like Rowling to knock out the same kind of material is, shall we say, somewhat disappointing.

Children exposed to this kind of writing aren’t learning anything new about words, or being stretched in any way; as Harold Bloom said, they’re not going to be inspired to go off and read the Alice books, or any other enduring classic.

People go hoopla because they’re delighted that Rowling has got children reading books - big, fat books without pictures at that. Can’t argue with that: and maybe they will learn something about sheer reading stamina in the process. But it’s all too easy.

A common thread in the complaints of the anti-Potter jihadis, it’s that the kids reading Potter should instead send their time reading . . . well, something else. For Harold Bloom, it’s The Wind in the Willows or Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. For John Dolan, it’s Diana Wynne Jones, whose books — judging from Dolan’s description — do in fact sound pretty good. But they’re ultimately no more convincing than the fundies who deplore the books for mingling “satanic” themes with quotidian settings, or the literary hall monitors who automatically assume that any adult who reads the books must be forced to grow up, preferably through a regimen of Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer.

As much as I like the Potter books, I can recognize that ambition and bestsellerdom have had a baleful effect on Rowling’s prose. Are the later books overwritten? Yep. Could they benefit from more discipline and sharper editing? Yessir! But I hardly ever put down a book without some cavils. I also hardly ever pick up a book with as much pleasurable expectation as I will Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.