From 2000: Joan Acocella delves into the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series.
Not since Y2K have we seen a fuss like the one over “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” , the fourth volume in J. K. Rowling’s series about a junior wizard. Biggest advance order ever , biggest first printing ever , biggest takeover, ever, of thebest-seller list by a single writer, let alone a children’s writer.
More, even, than the Potter books’ sensitivity to preteen terrors, it is their wised-upness, their lack of sentimentality, that must appeal to Rowling’s audience. However much they have to do with goodness, these are not prissy books. Harry lies to adults again and again. He also hates certain people, and Rowling hates them, too. Uncle Vernon Dursley is not only cruel; he spits when he talks. Harry says the Dursleys wish him dead, and he’s right.
Most of Rowling’s characters are types, and excellent as such, but some rise to a richness beyond the reach of British central casting. Voldemort, for example. When he failed to kill the infant Harry, Voldemort was disempowered, and it is in this weakened state that we first encounter him in “The Goblet of Fire.” But he isn’t just weak. He is—grotesquely, disgustingly, terrifyingly—a“hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black.
Each of the novels approaches the problem from a different angle. The first, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” is heroic. We meet our champion; he is a child; we watch him grow into competence and faith. The second volume, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” is quite different: secular, topical, political. Sexism is not a major problem at Hogwarts. The school is coed. Several of the Quidditch champions are girls.
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