And, sad to say, it's apparently not very good. I'm not surprised. The things that she did well in the Harry Potter books are not the things that make a good realist novel. An interesting thing about this review, and I guess about the book itself if one were to read it, is what it suggests about Rowling's Christianity. I always thought that those who thought her books were vehicles of black magic etc. were mistaken, but I also thought those who found an explicitly Christian theology in them were at best overstating the case. My impression always was that she has enough of Christian culture in her to use themes that have Christian connections and origins, but no more than that. This review makes it sound as if she's no great admirer of Christianity as an institution. That's just one review, of course, but it does fit with the impression I had from the Potter books.
J.K. Rowling Writes a Novel for Adults
12 responses to “J.K. Rowling Writes a Novel for Adults”
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My daughter bought it at the UD bookstore, read a little of it, and is returning it. Expensive and bad, she said.
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I’m not at all surprised (obviously). Too bad.
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I wonder if there will be any who like it?
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It strikes me that the number of authors who have been successful writing for both children and adults is quite small. This might have something to do with marketing departments at publishing companies, but maybe it has something to do with the nature of the writing as well.
C.S. Lewis is an obvious example of someone who succeeded on both scores. Rumer Godden wrote some fairly good stories for children in addition to her novels for adults. Oscar Wilde. I’m drawing blanks. -
Do you have The Kitchen Madonna Craig. Your kids are still young for that, but I’m not sure it’s easy to get a copy.
AMDG -
I see there’s an icky-looking reprint. You should secure an older one while you can.
AMDG -
It’s on my list, Janet, but we don’t have a copy yet. I’ll see about getting an older copy.
We were recently reading her The Mousewife, which we liked quite a bit, and we have a copy of A Kindle of Kittens, which is sweet but not as memorable. -
Genre writers in general often have trouble switching to mainstream or literary fiction. John Le Carre wrote the greatest spy stories ever, and the best are works of literature, but when he tried his hand at a Literary novel, it was generally panned by critics. Never read it so I don’t have a firsthand opinion.
In Rowling’s case, most grownups recognized that at the sentence and paragraph level she wasn’t real good. It didn’t matter that much because she had a good story to tell. Hard to see it working in anything but a thriller or something of that sort for adults. -
I agree, the genre thing is where the problem lies. Genre writers can often write for kids and adults, as long as they’re basically doing the same thing just for different age groups: Lewis and Tolkein are good examples. The question is whether what you do well is transferrable between genres – Roald Dahl succeeded at children’s fantasy and at realistic short stories for adults, but his cynicism about adult behaviour and barbed sense of humour are what drives both. Sometimes you can just be good at the things that drive lit fic and good at the things that drive scifi/fantasy – Iain Banks is an example. But the things that Rowling did well were more or less untransferable to less fantastic writing, so it’s unsurprising if her attempts at lit fic aren’t any good.
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All those silly puns, for instance.
I haven’t heard of Iain Banks. I’m not real familiar with Ursula LeGuin’s work, and not that wild about what I have read, but for some reason I picked up a collection of non-sci-fi short stories by her once and it was pretty good. Possibly what you say about Dahl would apply there.
I think there have been some writers who switched among genres–sci-fi, mystery, westerns. Elmore Leonard, for instance–crime/action and westerns. I’ve never read one of the latter but I can easily see how the basic techniques of the former could easily be put into different costumes, so to speak. -
I doubt you’d much like Banks, he’s a scottish lefty whose work is… I would say, indifferent to the spirit; so contentedly post-Christian that spiritual apprehension is something for his characters to dabble in the way they might dabble in drugs or eastern mysticism before deciding to just grow up and get on with life. At least, that’s what I got from his lit fic, which left me so indifferent I’ve not actually troubled to read enough of it to have an informed opinion. His scifi I liked, though, especially “Use of Weapons”.
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Not troubling to read enough of it to have an informed opinion describes my relationship to most contemporary fiction.
Light On Dark Water 
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